On 11/11/2017 19:10, Scott Hemphill wrote:
> I'm a long time lurker, here because occasionally the math is
> interesting. But recently, I got a chance to do some embedded
> programming. I thank Tim Wescott for his intro to PID controllers.
> I'll get to that bit, but first there's some background material.
>
> There's a program at Community Boating in Boston, Mass. which since at
> least 2013 has let high school students design software for controlling
> robotic sailboats. See the 3-minute YouTube video on the home page of
> www.robosail.org for a quick overview of the program.
Thanks for the interesting post, Scott.
I'm also a lurker here and an alumnus of Community Boating in Boston.
I mentor a FIRST Robotics team in Melrose, MA and "stole" Tim's PID
controller demo to help explain the concept to the students. Thanks, Tim!
Best wishes,
--Phil Martel
>
> Last month, the organizers decided to hold a class for for adults.
> There were a total of six two-hour evening sessions for programming,
> plus a few Saturdays for sailing. We were broken up into teams of three
> people for each of four boats. There was a fifth boat which wasn't
> quite ready to go, and I sort of accidentally became my own team while
> getting that boat fully equipped.
>
> Each boat is one meter in hull length. The height from the bottom of
> the keel to the top of the mast is about two meters. It was purchased
> as an RC model sailboat, but then converted by putting an Arduino
> between the onboard RC receiver and the servos for controlling the
> rudder and the sails.
>
> We're currently using an Arduino Mega, with a Grove shield. The inputs
> to the Arduino are:
>
> RC "throttle" control (PWM)
> RC "steering" control (PWM)
> Wind Vane on a magnetic encoder (PWM)
> Accelerometer/Magnetometer (I2C)
> GPS (UART)
>
> The outputs are to two servos, one for the sails, and one for the
> rudder.
>
> I added an Adafruit MicroSD card breakout board to my hardware
> configuration and wrote a logging module, which I used to record all the
> data from the sensors, and all the info from the decision-making
> functions.
>
> I also wrote a PID controller class, which I used in two types of
> circumstances. The first was to control the angle at which the boat is
> heeling over. When you are sailing close to the direction the wind is
> coming from, you have to pull the sails in all the way to make any
> progress. However, the wind tends to make the boat tip over, which you
> can control by either changing the direction the boat is sailing, or
> letting the sails out a bit. I decided to use a PID controller which is
> operative only when heeling over too far(*). I picked a target heeling
> angle of 30 degrees, although I'm actually using the raw Y-direction
> acceleration of +/-4.9m/s. The other place I use the PID controller
> class is to control the rudder in attempting to set a heading. The
> heading can either be relative to the wind (which we can see with the
> wind vane) or can be a compass direction.
>
> The class, and the sailing season ended far too quickly. We plan to
> start again in the spring. But here's a plot that shows the heeling
> correction being applied (but not yet tuned!)
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/53cadp5vtkih926/log0004.pdf?dl=0
>
> The approximate location on the dock where I first powered on the
> Arduino is (42.3592650N, 71.0734950W). The background of the plot is
> taken from Google Earth. The large grey arrow is the average wind
> direction during the trial, but during the first part of the trial, it
> was more directly towards the dock. The color of the track depends on
> what command the boat code was executing(**). It is green on the dock,
> when the software is in manual mode, but it is light blue on the water,
> when I switched into "sails follow wind" mode. This is a mode where I
> manually control the rudder, but the software has full control of the
> sails. The track would have been yellow if I had given it a command to
> sail a given heading relative to the wind, or a compass heading. Part
> of the track is underlaid with red, indicating that the heeling
> correction is being applied. Then every 30 seconds, I added an orange
> arrow giving the compass direction, corrected for magnetic variation.
> This arrow doesn't always agree very well with the track, for two
> reasons: first, the boat may be blown slightly sideways (which is called
> "leeway"), and second, I didn't ever do a complete calibration of the
> magnetometer.
>
> Of the most interest to me is the leftmost part of the track. After
> putting the boat in the water, I set it into "sails follow wind" mode
> and pushed the boat into the water. The winds were about 12knots, which
> is a lot of wind for these boats. That part of the track has periodic
> red segments, where heeling correction was being applied. What was
> happening is that the boat was heeling excessively, and the sails were
> being let out. Then the boat was standing up again, and the sails were
> being pulled back in. From the plot, it looks like there was an
> oscillation with a period of about three seconds. The PID controller
> was in P-only mode, until I could gauge how much correction needed to be
> applied. Having now seen the oscillation (although evident in the plot,
> I didn't notice it while sailing) I can start using the I component in
> future sails.
>
> Anyway, I just wanted to give a report on my intoduction to embedded
> programming and PID controllers.
>
> Scott
>
> (*) Actually, I always send the heel angle info the PID controller, but
> I ignore it if it calls for a negative correction, and keep the sum in
> the "I" part of the calculation zero.
>
> (**) Under manual mode, the RC "throttle" control is used to control the
> sails. When pushed forward, it lets the sails out, and when pulled
> back, it pulls the sails in. If the control is fully forward, however,
> that is a signal to the microcontroller that the boat is under software
> control. The RC "steering" control is held in the center by springs.
> If moved fully to the left, my software rotates a "zero" bit into a
> command input register. If moved fully to the right, my software
> rotates a "one" bit into the command input register. However, if it has
> been over a second since the last bit has been received, the register is
> cleared first, and this bit is the first one in the register. If four
> bits have been received, then this is interpreted as a new command to
> the boat, giving me a menu of 16 different things that the boat can do.
> This command will be executed whenever the boat is not under manual
> control.
>