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Getting started with the moteus controller

Binary versions of tview and moteus_tool can be installed for most platforms (desktop Linux, Windows, Mac) via python using the moteus_gui package.

pip3 install moteus_gui

Platform Specific Requirements

Raspberry Pi

If you have a Raspberry Pi, see the instructions here.

Linux

If using the fdcanusb, you will need to have udev rules set up in order for regular users to access the device. Follow the instructions at: https://github.com/mjbots/fdcanusb/blob/master/70-fdcanusb.rules

Windows

On some modern Windows installations, you need to invoke python as python, not python3.

Running tview

tview lets you configure and inspect the state of the controller. It can be run like:

python3 -m moteus_gui.tview --devices=1

(Your pip may have installed a tview script into your path which you could also use).

By default, it attempts to detect an attached fdcanusb to communicate with the target.

tview has three panes, left, right, and bottom. Further, the left pane has two tabs.

Left pane, right tab (the default) shows a hierarchical tree of all telemetry items.

Left pane, left tab shows a hierarchical tree of all configurable parameters. Parameter values can be updated by double clicking on their value and entering a new one.

The right pane shows real time plots of telemetry items. It can be populated with plots by right clicking on telemetry items in the telemetry tab.

The bottom pane has a command line console which shows the commands sent internally by tview and their responses, and provides an interactive console to interact with the device using the diagnostic protocol.

How position mode works

The primary control mode for the moteus controller is an integrated position/velocity controller. The semantics of the control command are somewhat unorthodox, so as to be easily amenable to idempotent commands sent from a higher level controller. Each command looks like:

  • Position: The desired position in revolutions
  • Velocity: The rate at which the desired position changes in revolutions / s
  • Maximum torque: Never use more than this amount of torque when controlling
  • Feedforward torque: Give this much extra torque beyond what the normal control loop says
  • Stop position: If non-special, never move the desired position away from this target.
  • kp scale: Scale the proportional constant by this factor
  • kd scale: Scale the derivative constant by this factor
  • Velocity limit override: If non-special, override the configured velocity limit, which constrains how quickly the target position is reached.
  • Acceleration limit override: If non-special, override the configured acceleration limit, which constrains how quickly the target position is reached.

Additionally, the position may be set as a "special value" (NaN for floating point and the debug interface, maximal negative for integer encodings). In that case, the position selected is "wherever you are right now".

A pure velocity mode can be obtained by setting the kp scale to 0 (or permanently so by configuring the kp constant to 0). In this case, using the servo.max_position_slip configurable parameter may be valuable as per the reference manual.

Initial Configuration

IMPORTANT NOTE ON ELECTRICAL DAMAGE

moteus uses moderately large currents and moderately high voltages. It is important to take many factors in consideration when deploying it to avoid electrical damage to the controller. Before soldering cables, or attaching moteus to a new motor, be sure to read and understand each of the following sections in the reference manual:

Parameters

There are a few parameters you will likely want to configure early on in your setup regardless:

  • servopos.position_min and servopos.position_max these define the bounds of motion which the controller will allow when in position control mode. Attempting to start beyond this region will fault, and if outside the region in operation, no torque will be applied to go further outside.
  • servo.max_current_A the maximum phase current to apply to the motor. This can be used to limit the maximum torque that the system is capable of regardless of any command sent.
  • servo.default_velocity_limit / servo.default_accel_limit controls how fast the motor can accelerate and spin in order to reach position and velocity targets. Bare boards ship with these unset, while development kits ship with human-eye pleasing values.
  • servo.pid_position the PID parameters for the position control loop.
  • motor_position.rotor_to_output_ratio any gearbox scaling, a reducing gearbox should be configured with a number smaller than one, e.g. 0.25 for a 4x reduction gearbox. This affects reported position, speed, and torques.
  • id.id the CAN-FD id used by this device

A larger set of parameters is documented in the reference manual.

Calibration

If you started from a bare moteus board, you will need to calibrate it for the attached motor before any control modes are possible.

python3 -m moteus.moteus_tool --target 1 --calibrate

WARNING: Any attached motor must be able to spin freely. It will be spun in both directions and at high speed.

Learning more

The complete reference documentation can be found at: Reference