96 both production machinery and quality control checks. With new, more advanced motor control boards featuring higher quantities of copper and gold, standard pick-andplace machines will not cope well unless revamped significantly to account for the heat transmission requirements of boards with higher than typical metallic infills. Producing such PCBs means getting more heat into the boards, in order to ensure solder materials can reflow correctly, which can be challenging given that such advanced boards are designed layer by layer to inherently wick heat away as quickly as possible. Quality control approaches are being stepped up also, with growing use of 3D optical inspection machines, constructed of six or so cameras on gantries, and using both their optics and different light projections to produce granularly detailed measurements, as fine as 6 microns (0.006 mm) in some cases. While this can mean generating up to 2 GB of 3D model data per inspected ESC board, and could hence merit considerable overhauls of manufacturers’ data extraction and storage facilities, the validation entailed is a critical addition to existing human analysts. Every component and solder joint is being precisely evaluated for correct position, orientation, flatness and other parameters, to a level of fidelity beyond human ocular patdowns, and potentially against a preexisting ‘gold standard’ motor controller product for extra certainty. That level of precision can also be useful in automating traceability measures. Serial codes, QR codes and so on can be autonomously tracked and read not only by colour patterns but also by the depth of engravings and inks present. That ensures any failure in any one sub-component of a given motor controller can be traced back to its 3D model, its supplier, its journey through the factory, and its end-of-line tests to pinpoint why any fault or even slight performance shortfall might have happened from a production standpoint. End-of-line tests are particularly stringent, given the safety-critical nature of ESCs. These can particularly consist of installing each motor controller and using it to spool up an e-motor, then recording and checking the results. Future Given the rate of competition in both autonomous and electrified vehicles, motor controllers in the uncrewed world are well-placed to benefit from a host of advancements across academia and OEM research labs aimed at driving advancements at the molecular level for every key component they use. Many of these are likely to concern thermal management, which has been cited to us as the most untapped of low-hanging fruit in EV engineering. Not only are many propositions for advanced board components and heat mitigation methods coming forth today, but means of sensing or predicting hotspots in different components are also being found. Similarly, means for detection and mitigation of other issues such as switching oscillations or harmful resonances are being found, and could transmute through to commercial application before long. Such discoveries lend credence to the idea of a highly data- and analyticsdriven future in uncrewed systems; as owning fleets of autonomous aircraft, April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Manufacturing variations downstream of the ESC plus cost and performance nuances keep some manufacturers away from FOC, and focused more on trapezoidal or other commutation forms (Image courtesy of Currawong) Manufacturing reliable and traceable motor controllers takes significant tuning of pick-and-place machines as well as use of high-end optical inspection systems (Image courtesy of Hargrave)
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