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Electric Motors Control
65 students
Electric Motors Control
Build your own servo drive: from hardware to software control (FOC)
Created byFabrizio Frigeni
Last updated 1/2026
English
What you'll learn
- Understand how electric motors and encoders work
- Design the hardware components of a servo drive
- Program electronic commutation via field-oriented control (FOC)
- Analyze frequency response of servo loop controller
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Course content
8 sections • 30 lectures • 3h 31m total length
Requirements
- Understanding of basic electrical concepts
Description
This course describes how electric motors work and how servo drives can be built and programmed to control them.
We first provide an overview of different kinds of motors, but then we focus particularly on synchronous brushless motors and their position encoders because they are the state-of -the-art solution for advanced motion applications.
The section on servo drives is at the core of this course. We describe how a servo drive is built both from a hardware and a software perspective.
We introduce all the power electronic components required to drive an electric motor: from power switches to current sensors to voltage converters. We highlight all the standard safety functions needed to minimize potential risks. We also show the process of design and fabrication of PCBs in case you want to build your own drive.
We then describe the software algorithms in detail. The firmware architecture of a servo drive is made up of two fundamental components: the servo loop controller using a cascaded PID structure; and the field-oriented control (FOC) algorithm for electronic commutation. We look at how to efficiently generate an inducted magnetic flux in the stator in order to optimally drive the rotor and maximize quadrature current component. The generation of the motor phase voltages according to the space vector modulation is the final step of the commutation process.
Who this course is for:
- Electronics students who want to understand the tricks behind controlling electric motors