PD Control on the Nomad 200

Daniel Lowd

CS154 / Spring 2003


Part 1

Using the provided source file pd.cc, I attempted to determine the stability point via a binary search through all possible gains Kp.  1.0 was clearly too great; 0.5 seemed stable; 0.75 was not, nor was 0.6; 0.55 was inconsistently stable -- some runs overshot and hit 1001 or 1002, but not all.  0.54, 0.53, and 0.52 were all progressively more stable.  By about 0.52 or 0.51, overshooting was rare or nonexistent, which lead me to believe that 0.5 is a safe gain for a proportional control using these parameters.  For these experiments, I used the default delay time of 1.5 seconds and maximum speed of 1000, in units of tenths of an inch per second.

Proportional control, gain 0.5, no overshoot
Figure 1: Distance (0.1 in) vs. time (s) for proportional control using a gain of 0.5.

Proportional control, gain 0.75, some overshoot
Figure 2: Distance (0.1 in) vs. time (s) for proportional control using a gain of 0.75

Proportional control, gain of 1.0, big overshoot
Figure 3: Distance (0.1 in) vs. time (s) for proportional control using a gain of 1.0

Part 2

I automated this somewhat by modifying pd.cc to display the rise time if it settled within 0.1 inches of the goal without overshooting.  If it overshot by more than 0.1 inches, then it would instead print, "OVERSHOOT."  I tried varying the proportional and derivative gains extensively, but was unable to tune them very well.  The problem was that I would get different results from different runs with the same parameters!  The gains that got a rise time of 6 seconds in one trial would take 8 seconds in another.  Some parameters overshot inconsistently.  I found that with a proportional gain of 0.45 and a derivative gain of 0.05 I sometimes got decent results, but that's only a rough estimate since I could get no reliable data.  The rise times I observed generally were between 6 and 8 seconds, though some parameter cominations took 11 or 13 seconds.

Part 3

I'm not sure what values to use for this -- as mentioned before, I cannot get consistent results.  I think the main thing that I've learned from all this is that there is a tradeoff between a fast rise time and consistently avoiding overshooting.


Appendix

Source code: pd.cc