

Use sensors (closed loop control) Appropriate sensors to help your robot account for inconsistencies in field, setup, game pieces, battery level, etc. Don’t get me wrong, top teams will do both and have better than 90% success at it, but in my experience, a lot of teams that could be competitive are not prioritizing auto enough to compete with the stronger teams.ģ Ingredients Quick, effective mechanisms Easy to edit But in putting in the effort to have a consistent auto and trained drivers, you can be prepared to widen that gap. You might say that’s not a lot less, and it’s not. But even if they were 100% consistent at this, that would only be an expected 15 points per match (which is less than 18). A lot of robots had difficulty getting through the match, onto the tower grounds, and climbing. On the other hand, that year a team could climb in the end game for 15 points. 90% x 20 points is an expected 18 points per match. Let’s say for the sake of argument that they were only 90% consistent. A lot of teams that have learned to prioritize Auto got these consistently. In 2016, (Stronghold) robots got 10 points for crossing a defense and 10 points for scoring in the high goal in auto. TODO: fill this in a little more once we get the game for 2019 Notes: Every year there has been a way to score points for your alliance by just moving In the past, auto has been the first or second tie-breaker A consistent auto is worth more than an if-y end game. Therefore, PID tuning is essentially an engineering art that cannot only rely on automated processes but requires the experience of the designer.If your robot: Is easy to code for auto Has the software architected so that auto coding is simple Has driver’s that are practiced You have a mountain of potential to do well. A variety of techniques such as Gain scheduling are employed to deal with this fact. As the PID is controller, it naturally cannot maintain an equally good behavior for the full flight envelope of the system. With the exception of hover/or trimmed-flight, an aerial vehicle is a nonlinear system.The integral term needs special caution due to the often critically stable or unstable characteristics expressed by unmanned aicraft.The control margins of the aerial vehicle have limits and therefore the PID controller has to be designed account for these constraints.

Among others, the following important issues have to be considered when designing flight control functionalities using PID controllers: Real-life implementation of PID controllers is however a much more elaborated process. Nowadays, modern tools exist to optimally tune such control laws. The PID controller is so successful both due its powerful performance and its simplicity.
