[David Lame]

Ramping, softening the banging, any of those various solutions are possible. The question is are they necessary at all?

I used the Bang-Bang, and it works, and the robot still drove afterwards. The only modification I made is that I found the +/- 1 didn't respond fast enough. There was overshoot. So as it got closer, I would ramp down to +/- .5, and then +/- .3. It still worked really nicely. I could achieve +/- 1 degree accuracy within about 200 milliseconds. It was a good deal faster than my PID implementations, and generally more accurate.

However, I only ran it through a few trials. I executed it maybe 20 times. If we were to use it in a match, it would happen several times in each match.

If I ramp it down, I'll likely lose a bit of performance. Do I need to? Can those CIMs and Toughboxes take it, or is there any way to know, other than trying it, find out, and have some money in the budget for replacement Toughboxes if it turns out that the answer is they aren't rugged enough?

And even with PIDs, the issue could still come up. If you have a significant value of D, sensor noise can can cause that derivative to change quite rapidly, resulting in some sign changes, sometimes with fairly high magnitude. Will that take a toll? There are, of course, ways to combat that as well.

However, to reiterate, the question is not what can be done about it, but rather whether anything needs to be done about it? I was an EE, so I never got to properties of different sorts of metal gears. I'm wondering if there are any guidelines or ways of predicting what is and isn't safe to throw at a motor or transmission.