Battery Management System and Motor Control Board

Robotic systems operating in energy-constrained and unstructured environments require efficient motion control, reliable power management, and real-time system awareness to sustain autonomous performance. The Drexel Robotics Lunabot is an autonomous, battery-operated lunar excavator developed for the NASA Lunabotics competition. It currently faces critical limitations, including the absence of real-time battery state visibility, reliance on brushed DC motors with large gear reductions, and fragmented power and control architectures that reduce efficiency, increase system mass, and constrain operational insight. To address these challenges, this work presents the design and implementation of an integrated battery management and motor-controller interface assembled into a single printed circuit board (PCB) tailored to the Lunabotics rover platform. The proposed architecture consolidates brushless DC (BLDC) motor control capability, battery state monitoring, CAN-based communication, and hardware safety protections into a compact and modular embedded system. A high-efficiency BLDC drivetrain with torque-controlled drivers reduces gearbox requirements and improves mechanical performance, while a single-chip high-side battery management topology enables accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation, current sensing, and fault protection within competition safety constraints. Embedded firmware implemented on an STM32 microcontroller using a RealTime Operating System (RTOS) coordinates motor control, communication, and protection logic with microsecond-scale response latency. Our design validation follows a three-phase methodology consisting of subsystem prototyping using development boards, fabrication of a custom four-layer PCB, and full electrical, thermal, and control integration with the existing rover platform. The resulting system provides a scalable, efficient, and safety-compliant power and drive backbone for the rover and establishes a reusable architecture for future collegiate robotics and research platforms.