A Paradigm of Government/Industry/University Cooperation: A PSoC Controller for a NASA Robotic Arm

As part of art engineering capstone design course, a team of five students designed and built a controller for a robotic arm supplied as a technical platform by NASA. Control hardware and development environment tools were provided by Cypress Semiconductor forming a cooperative triad between NASA, Cypress and Michigan State University to fully sponsor this project. The arm uses a mixture of servomotors and DC motors, which require different control signals. Most microcontrollers would require a number of peripheral devices to generate the analog signals needed by the DC motors and the pulse-width modulated signals to drive the servomotors. The Cypress programmable system- on-a-chip (PSoC), however, provided a unique and manageable single-chip solution This paper gives a high-level overview of the project and of how the PSoC was configured for this application.