AMDC: Open-Source Control and Sensing Platform for Advanced Electric Motor Drives

Advanced electric motor drives require high-performance control platforms to implement real-time control algorithms. Commercial rapid control prototyping platforms are often used to quickly evaluate various algorithms. Unfortunately, these platforms are expensive and closed-source which can make it difficult to implement ultra-custom research projects. This paper introduces an open-source electric motor drive control and sensing platform which has been developed and published freely online to promote a community of motor drive scholars. The platform includes hardware design files, firmware sources, and an extensive documentation website with tutorials and user guides. Motor control students, researchers, and designers can build and disseminate new knowledge using the open-source sandbox. It is flexible and high-performance to enable next generation research, while also being easy-to-use for learning electric drive controls. The controller is called the Advanced Motor Drive Controller (AMDC) which contains a powerful Xilinx Zynq-7000 dual-core real-time processor, programmable logic, and a plethora of inputs and outputs tailored specifically for the needs of advanced electric drives. Along with the AMDC, the Advanced Motor Drive Sensing (AMDS) system is developed and published online for modular voltage and current sensing. Experimental results are presented which show that the AMDC is capable of three-phase dq current regulation using 64-bit floating point math at control frequencies up to 400 kHz. The AMDC and AMDS platforms accelerate the development of motor drives, allowing researchers to reach a working solution faster while still maintaining complete control of the entire hardware and firmware stack.