Nominal Drive Slope

The nominal component is an initial guess of the drive level that would sustain a given velocity in the steady state.

For a requested velocity of 0, the upper-transfer graph indicates that no drive was applied. Without a drive, the motor eventually comes to rest. For non-zero velocities, most motors exhibit a dead zone in which the armature magnetization is insufficient to overcome the starting friction. Therefore, the nominal drive graph takes a discontinuous jump from 0. Due to the antenna's imbalances, this dead zone can also be asymmetric for both directions of motion.

These positive and negative starting drives are designated as pstall and nstall on the graph. Once the motor starts, a nominal slope is designated as pslope for the positive velocity and nslope for the negative velocity. Both are used to predict the required drive for large requested velocities.