Hello,
I am a STEAM teacher who is working on building a robot for a competition with my students. We are designing a robot that will follow a student who is on crutches or in a wheelchair. The robot will carry the student’s school supplies. We have a Pixy 2 sensor, an arduino Uno board, and four 12V, 52RPM 291.6oz-in Precision Planetary Gearmotors on a Prowler 4WD Robot platform. My son, who is a mechanical engineer, is worried that the arduino board may not be able to handle the battery power for the four motors. Will we need a separate controller to take input from the arduino and regulate power to the motors? If so, what would you recommend? I should also say that for the competition, we are not filling the drawers on the robot with actual school supplies to keep the weight at a minimum. We only have 5 minutes to present our project so the robot does not have to travel far. It is only a prototype.
Thanks for your help,
Cathy Grant
Hi Cathy,
Your son is correct. The Arduino won’t be able to drive the motors. It will need to be interfaced with a Motor Driver that can handle the current that the motors will draw at full load.
This blog post will provide some useful information and good insight on how to choose a motor driver for your application.
Do you have the product number or datasheet for the motors you are using ? We can probably suggest you a motor driver that will fit.
Regards,
Hello,
The motors we have are the 12V 52RPM 291.6oz-in Precision Planetary Gearmotors (RB-Sct-618).
Thanks,
Cathy Grant
The stall current of the 12V, 52RPM 291.6oz-in Precision Planetary Gearmotor is 4.9A at 12V. Therefore, the continuous current consumption at rated load could be approximated to 0.98-1.225A at 12V (20-25% of the stall current).
You should be able to use this Dimension Engineering Sabertooth Dual 5A Regenerative Motor Driver in a mixed mode configuration with your four motors.
You can download the Arduino library here which include sample codes to help you interface the driver with the Arduino board.
