Posted 14 March 2017

As I was doing the IR homing tests described in my last post, I noted that Wall-E2 wasn’t all that great at homing; in particular it missed the opening in the lead-in rails on several occasions, instead hanging up on one side or another.  This was a bit mystifying to me, as I thought I had the homing code working very well with my old 3-wheel robot (see ‘IR Light Follower for Wall-E2, Part X – More PID Tuning‘).  At the time, I decided to use one of my best scientific research tools and simply ignore the problem, hoping it would either go away, or my subconscious mind (by far smarter than my conscious one!) would figure it out in the shower or while drifting off to sleep.

And, in fact, last night while drifting off to sleep, I remembered that the PID tuning for the 3-wheel robot had to take into account the fact that  even small  differences in drive wheel speeds get magnified by the free-castering front wheel.  Wall-E2, with its all-wheel drive  behaves entirely differently, and since small wheel speed differences don’t get amplified into big directional changes, the PID tuning parameters appropriate for the 3-wheel version are too passive for the 4-wheel one.

So, I went back to the drawing board (again!) for PID tuning for the 4WD Wall-E2, starting with the current 3-wheel parameters as the ‘too passive’ baseline.  From my previous article, the final PID parameters were P = 0.1, I = 10, D = 0.2, with the input scaled by 1, 5, or 10 depending on IR beam signal strength.  My initial thought is that the 4WD robot needs a lot more ‘D’ (differential) to increase its turn rate with respect to IR beam heading changes, so I tried a couple of runs with the D value increased from 0.2 to 2 (factor of 10 increase).  As the following video shows, this did seems to increase Wall-E2’s agility somewhat, but still not enough to overcome even minor initial heading offsets, especially to the left.

After some more testing with different values of P,I,D, I began to wonder if I might be having problems with the basic IR detection hardware and homing software, independent of the PID tuning issue.  When I did the previous PID study, I also captured the raw detector data, which allowed me to determine how the PID tuning and the basic detection hardware/software were interacting.  I may have to go back and do that again with the 4WD setup

Stay tuned,

Frank