A hardware DC motor emulator

Abstract

Much work have been done lately to develop complex motor control systems. However they always rely on a physical drive/motor/encoder setup for experimental results. This paper presents a hardware DC motor emulator that can be synthesized to FPGAs. The emulator is intended to replace an actual DC motor during the development phase of motor controllers. A torque based input is required and incremental encoder output is provided, so this model can replace both the DC motor, and its power driver without modifications to the motor control system. The proposed emulator is able to reach a clock frequency of hundreds of megahertz and uses very few logic resources in current FPGA technologies. The hardware can be parameterized at synthesis time to make the model suitable for specific needs.