Robot Power System for Outdoor Use

The purpose of building this project is to create a small power plant for mobile outdoor robots that is based on a gas engine.

A gas engine and a modified automobile alternator are used to develop an outdoor robot power system which can deliver more amp-hours of energy than batteries. Proper power generation is assured by the power plant by having some electronics such as the alternator current/voltage regulator and throttle controller. The field current is controlled by the regulator using external resistors and if shunt-off feature reaches 14.5V, a battery can be charged. The output current gets related to engines throttle using the controller that is based on SX28AC/SS Parallax microcontroller.

In the design, the shafts should be perfectly aligned if an alternator is coupled to a small gas engine. The engine RPM is related closely to the amount of current generated wherein more power is obtained with the higher engine throttle. To manage the throttle, the magneto pulses are counted using a servo and an SX28AC/SS on Proto board. The goal was to set the engine at known RPMs and known current output after measuring the current at different RPMs.

Rest of the project