Clarification on PID motion control?

[mprohorov]

At St. Louis, Team 254 hosted a spectacular conference on Motion Control. I'm part of my programming team, and I wanted to really note down some of the concepts the Cheesy Poofs were talking about as a working PID loop will make the DriveTrain so much smoother during autonomous.

However, I did find the conference hard to follow because the concepts involved pretty advanced physics topics, and I haven't taken AP Physics yet in high school.

I was hoping one of the mentors from 254 or from other teams with a working motion control system can help clarify these concepts to me so that my team can get a working, tuned PID loop in our code.

I'm looking for help in mostly the following topics:


Kinematics
Tuning PIDs
Feedforward
Figuring out Paths and Trajectories


I'd just like someone to explain these concepts and their role in tuning PIDs.

Thank you so much in advance :D .

[connor.worley]

http://m.eet.com/media/1112634/f-wescot.pdf This is a useful PID explanation, although it doesn't cover everything you asked for

[PeterBrock]

Thanks to 254 for the Control System talk at St Louis. I was hoping that the slides would be posted from the talk but so far I have not found them on the FIRST site. Can 254 please post the slides on CD.