The robot as a system
What a robot program is really doing: a loop that senses, decides and acts, on hardware that answers late, imperfectly, and without knowing where it is. Measuring your own robot and plotting what it did.
Start in the simulator- U1.1 Sense, decide, act The control loop, its period, and the deadman that stops a robot whose program has gone quiet.
- U1.2 A command is a request Open loop on real hardware: gain that is not 1, a dead band, a lag, and a robot that curves.
- U1.3 Truth and belief position() is the lab's overhead camera. odometry() is what the robot has, and it drifts.
- U1.4 Time, rate and latency How often the loop runs, how late the answer arrives, and what both do to a controller.
- U1.5 Seeing the signal plot(): reading a control loop as a chart instead of a column of numbers.
- U1.6 Measuring your robot A step response: top speed, time constant and dead band, measured rather than assumed.
- U1.7 Project: write the data sheet Characterise the robot you were given and print the figures the rest of the course will use.