Robot Power Systems & Battery Management
This is course 3 of the Robotics Hardware & Systems track, and it deals with the part of a robot that gets ignored until it catches fire or dies mid-demo: the power system. Course 1 covered how motors turn electricity into motion, and course 2 covered the embedded compute that decides when to move, but neither answered where the electricity actually comes from or how it gets safely distributed. Here we cover battery chemistry choices for mobile robots, how to read cell configuration notation like 3S 4000mAh 25C, how to budget power draw across motors, compute, and sensors before you ever buy a battery, how buck and boost converters carve a single pack voltage into the multiple rails a robot actually needs, and the safety practices that keep a LiPo pack from becoming a fire hazard. Course 4 will pull all four courses together into a full robot build.