Design of Tiny High-Power Motor Driver without Liquid Cooling for Humanoid JAXON

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design of a tiny high-power motor driver without a liquid cooling system. A high-power humanoid robot JAXON developed in our laboratory has a liquid cooling system for cooling motors and motor drivers. Thanks to the liquid cooling system, JAXON realizes high-power motion. However, the liquid cooling system makes the robot heavy. Hence, we designed a motor driver which is air cooling and smaller than the existing one while keeping its performance. There are two key points to realize tiny high-power motor driver. One is absorbing temperature rise due to instantaneous high current by using a heavy copper circuit board as a thermal buffer. The other is keeping steady board temperature low by reducing power consumption of motor driver. By applying developed motor driver to JAXON1, JAXON1 was able to reduce the weight of 7.1 [kg].