What does open loop mean?
Control without measurement: send a command and hope. Drive for two seconds and assume you went forty centimetres.
In a lesson
A program that says "forward for 3 seconds" and never looks is open loop: it acts and hopes. A program that looks at the sensors while it acts and adjusts is closed loop: what the sensors say feeds back into what the motors do. Every accurate robot is closed loop.
Learn it
- Taught in 2.5 Drift and correction Sensing, Robot club
Used in
- 3.2 Proportional control
- U1.2 A command is a request
- U5.1 The feedback loop
- U11.7 Project: find the one that is green
- U12.2 Fitting a model to data
- U12.6 The reality gap, and honest evaluation