Autonomous Test 2

In this test I finally got the arm to become stable! The trick dealt with giving it a tolerance area to kill voltage. Ideally it wouldn't need this, but with such dynamic change to how the voltage impacts the arm speed it was necessary to avoid over compensation. PID also plays a part in this as I need 'I' to handle applying enough voltage at any given time when the weight of the claw takes its toll. As stated in any PID documentation lowering P and I help to prevent and the only trade off should be time. In this video the force feed is set to 24 radian acceleration rate with 18 radians per second as a max speed guideline. The tolerance is a half radian (about 27 degrees). The original reason this was set so high is to get enough momentum to relieve strain to the window motor, and also to have high enough delta for an attempt to use "P" alone. While this is successful it may be too quick and cause strain on the chains, and it may fling the tube from the grip. However, it does demonstrate the stability of this design to withstand a bad stress. It should be concevable to slow the speed down to find the ideal rotational velocity that is a happy balance of not too much strain on either the motor or chains.

Click Here to see some brief video footage 24 radian test.

Since the inital test I have improved the speed to 10 radians increased PID where P=1 I=0.125, decreased tolerance to .10 (a tenth of a radian 5 degrees). This should be the pretty close to the final setting, but we'll need to review this again with the final arm length and weight.

Click Here to see some brief video footage 10 radian test.