[Guy Davidson]

Q,

The idea of using the preferred response to tune a PID is interesting. Once I'm done getting other components of our coprocessor up and running I will probably try that as a tuning method and see how well it works.

Your idea detailed last page is also very interesting. I think it's important to decide what your goals are - lowest time to reach the target or reaching it smmothly. I don't know yet which will seem more important for this year's challenge, but until now I am tempted to say that the time it takes to go from position a to position b might be more important than the smoothness, particularly for a servo or autonomous position control. However, I am wondering about human controlled velocity PID - would you rather have a slight overshoot as you attempt to reach the target velocity, or would you prefer to reach it slower but more smoothly, perhaps taking a bit longer to get there.

The idea of having a fully mathematical computation of to handle constant accceleration and constant velocity is interesting. Again, I might mess around with that a bit before or during the build season, depending on how much time I end up having. If I do, I'll be sure to let you know what results I get. I'm also currently reading about Laplace transforms and State-Space controls (amongst other control systems) to see maybe there's a reasonably easy alternative to PID.