Rockwell Innovation in Control

[cruddy4]

Originally Posted by smurfgirl

1124 won that award in CT this year, and I think one thing that might have helped is that our programmer made nice handouts with block diagrams to explain how the control system worked to other teams and the judges. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with it to fully understand it or explain it here, but I'll send someone along who can give you the details on what it did.

I'm no programmer, but this is what I know about this subject- acceleration in any direction follows the graph y=x^3, and we adjusted it so that there is no slipping, but it doesnt take a long time to accelerate. We have deceleration on a y=x graph, but theres also a PID loop that measures a floor encoder and a shaft on the gearbox, to compare shaft spin to floor distance traveled. If at any time the floor distance traveled is less than the motor spin, that means its skidding, and the programming will tell the motor to slow down accordingly. The PID loop allows good pushing too- because when being pushed, it virtually eliminates any unnecessary wheel spin, giving the robot nice traction.

Our camera tracks all the time too... For those of you who dont know our robot- its a turret with a camera above it that tracks a trailer and turns the turret accordingly. Sometimes it locks on other trailers we dont want to attack, but we changed manual mode so it turns the camera along with the turret. This way, when we switch back into manual, the camera can lock onto the correct trailer...