Elevator Motion Profiling / PID Ramping

[JABot67]

Originally Posted by Aero

Any sort of speed control won't really work, because our elevator is really fast. It's about 0.75 seconds from bottom to top.
We have limited the max output of our PID controller, but that only provides a max speed, and no acceleration ramping.

I'm still looking into dynamic motion profiling, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Closed loop speed control should allow you to set the speed to whatever you want it to be. You could make it so that it takes 4 seconds or 8 seconds or 16 seconds to go from bottom to top.

Open loop speed control allows your driver/operator to control the elevator's up/down motion directly (at least during teleop). This means that the operator can theoretically make sure the elevator isn't going too fast.

Of course the downside of these options is that it's hard to have position setpoints (ground, 1tote, 2totes, etc) but if you're just trying to get your elevator to stop throwing totes they probably would work.

Motion profiling would be an excellent next step if you think it's both important to have preset positions for the elevator (thus requiring position control) and use the max translation speed of your elevator during the travel time between positions. Downside, of course, is that it's harder to program.