[Programming] PID, Drive, and Parallel Coding

Programming this week is still far ahead of schedule, having completed the drive code in its entirety. All that remains left to write of the code that “makes the robot drive” is to tune our PID Controller gains.

A PID Controller allows us to very accurately, drive the motors at a speed that has a physical meaning to a human, instead of driving the motors based solely off of a voltage that we send to them, and then figure out later about how fast each voltage drives the robot. With a PID, we will instead be telling the controller to drive the robot at 0.5 meters per second, a value much friendlier to human eyes.

We are also continuing to use github, and our branching strategies have become increasingly complex, and therefore interesting (right?). Below is a link to our “main” github repository’s network graph, where you can see the parallel development taking place right in front of your eyes!

https://github.com/mcoffin/RMR662-2012/network