Design of BLDC Motor Controller for Electric Power Wheelchair

The electric power wheelchair needs to control motor torque and speed for responding to variable actions given by handling a joystick. In this paper a DSP-based BLDC motor controller using a single dc-link current sensor is presented for electric power wheelchair. It is composed by a DSP processor and three-phase inverter module. To control torque, high speed current control is achieved by the PI controller and pulse width modulation (PWM) signals with 25 kHz carrier frequency, which is performed by 200 ${\mu}sec$ cycle. The speed controller computes the new direct current reference from the speed error and the PI control equation. The displacement value by handling the joystick is converted to reference speeds of right and left wheel motors using nonholonomic wheelchair kinematics. Experimental results show that the presented control system is enough to implement a speed servo in wheelchair driving.