PID- another perspective

This week, a few new students have continued to learn about PID control. In particular, Hayden and Richard have been working hard to make the lift on last year’s robot, Mothman, lift with PID control. PID stands for proportional, integral, and derivative. The idea behind PID control is to have a target, and for the robot to get to that target efficiently. In the case of the lift, encoder values can tell how high the lift is. If you want the lift to consistently go up 29 inches, using PID is an excellent way to get the lift to hit that target consistently and efficiently.

Using last year’s official code as a reference, a PID controller was made for the lift. Then the PID had to be calibrated by changing the proportional, integral, and derivative values.

However, we noticed that the PID worked better when it was going up to the setpoint than when it went down to the setpoint.

We concluded that gravity made the lift accelerate faster and caused the PID to always overshoot the target. As such, our next goal was to create two PIDs, one lifting up, and one for lifting down.

The new programming students this year are working very hard and tackling some very hard concepts. But they are doing great, and the future for programming is looking bright!

-Rene C