Last year a warehouse robotics team I worked with spent eleven weeks chasing a bug that turned out to be a voltage sag. Their AMR kept stalling on a specific stretch of concrete near a charging dock. Software logs looked clean.
Their lead engineer finally put a scope on the motor rail and watched a 400mV dip every time the drive reversed direction. That dip was a regulator problem, not a code problem.
Here is what matters: most robotics teams treat the power stage as a solved commodity and pour their attention into perception and control. That order is backwards. [Read more…] about Why Your Robot’s Power Supply is the Real Bottleneck