Ricerc@Sapienza

Unmanned aerial vehicles are characterized by a set of requirements, like high efficiency, resiliency, and reliability that conflict with the other main requirement of high power density aimed at minimizing the overall weight and size. This article proposes a novel, modular multiphase drive for a quadrotor drone, realized through the integration of an axial flux permanent magnet machine and a GaN-based power electronic converter. After an overview of the design process, starting from the propeller choice, a brief description of the system components is presented.

In this paper it is shown how to obtain a low-cost, high-resolution and fault-robust position sensing system for permanent magnet synchronous motor drives operating in safety-critical systems, by combining high-frequency signal injection with binary Hall-effect sensors. It is shown that the position error signal obtained via high-frequency signal injection can be merged easily into the quantization-harmonic-decoupling vector tracking observer used to process the Hall-effect sensor signals.

Radiation hardening for coping with cosmic-ray-induced faults in electronic equipment has always been a central topic of hardware/software development for aerospace missions. This work presents the design, verification and validation of an 8-bit space-rated RISC MCU FPGA soft-core, featuring hardware architecture and instruction set architecture full compliance with Microchip® PICmicro Midrange MCU.