Feature Breakdown

This page contains a high level overview of select features of the Nitrate motor controller.

Sensor Fusion

Nitrate is capable of fusing data from remote sensors with its rotor position sensor to provide a high bandwidth, backlash compensated position estimate. While active, Nitrate will continuously fuse the remote sensor values while they get published and track the mismatch between it’s rotor position and the remote sensor. Configurable maximum mismatch, timeout, and failure modes (trust the sensor and trust the rotor) allow for a high degree of flexibility and control.

PID Control

Nitrate has a built in PID engine that runs at 10kHz. In addition to kV, kA, and kG feedforwards, it also supports arbitrary feedforwards, integral windup limits, dual PID slots for gain scheduling, and seperate elevator and arm feedforward modes.

High-rate Odometry

Nitrate’s Atomic Bond enables odometry at 500+ Hz with minimal bus impact.

Motion Profiling

Nitrate supports motion profiling with a trapezoidal velocity profile. The profile can be configured to use seperate maximum velocity, acceleration, and deceleration values. The profiler runs at at 10kHz with the PID engine to create ultra-smooth profiles.

Limits

Nitrate supports stator and bus current limiting, thermal protection and limiting, ramp controllers, soft limits, and hard limits. Intelligent thermal limiting will dynamically and continuously adjust the output of the motor to prevent overheating.