Teaching

Laboratorio di Automazione

The course will provide the skill on the field of embedded systems design and control.
The course addresses design, control, programming of automatic systems as well as design , control, perception and navigation of autonomous systems.
The objective of the course is to provide the background knowledge for the design of small automatic systems and autonomous robotic systems as well as to provide the necessary tools to operate autonomously in indoor or outdoor environments applying state-of-the-art on navigation and control algorithms based on embedded technology.

The course consists of three parts: first, the basics of embedded microcontroller are treated, along with their application to control. The second part covers different of the more important types of technologies used for sensing and to control autonomous systems. Finally, the field of application and programming of an embedded microcontroller will be investigated, basically equipping an autonomous system designed and constructed in our laboratory. As examples of particular importance, we address on the embedded applications to quadrotors, coaxial rotors, legged robots, wheeled vehicles and others autonomous systems.

These three main topics provide the link to real applications and to the state of the art in embedded robotics and autonomous systems research.

In the design of the proposed embedded control systems, a specific micro controller is examined in detail as an example of embedded controller. The analysis of the resources incorporated and integrated with this micro controller is proposed. Analog to digital conversion, PWM outputs, serial communications and Wireless communications are presented as functional blocks for real-time controllers. For all the items developed in classroom, different laboratories activities have been planned. Students are invited to develop a project on a topic of the course. All projects have a design and an hardware and software realization, the electronics of the I/O interface will be also analyzed. Students will learn how to analyze data-sheets how to interface electromechanical devices with the micro controller in order to allocate processor resources and to define driver electronics.