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Unread 12-21-2012, 02:01 AM
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Paul Copioli Paul Copioli is offline
President, VEX Robotics, Inc.
FRC #3310 (Black Hawk Robotics)
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Re: Motion Profiling

I agree with Austin on this one. Velocity feed forward (and acceleration FF, and current FF) all work to stabilize the PID loop. Instead of your proportional gain having to do all the heavy lifting, a small understanding of PWM in value vs actual rotational speed will decrease the proportional gain required. At full voltage the PID is ideally only dealing with disturbances. As the battery dies, the P will have to do a little more work since the FF mapping is no longer valid (but better than 0).

In our FRC auton application it is a huge advantage to use FF gain since you are presumably using a fully charged battery.

Put another way, the P gain is a multiplier. The smaller that multiplier is allowed to be, the less oscillation and general "what the heck just happened" sessions will happen.
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In full disclosure I am the President of VEX Robotics, a division of Innovation First International.