-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Introduction to controls
In a general sense, a control system is a system that controls any other system. This definition, however, is not particularly useful to us, so for our purposes we will narrow it down a little bit:
A control system is a piece of logic that is designed to control a physical system (collection of actuators, motors).
The specific subset of control systems we will focus on, is software that uses approximation of physics of a system, in order to calculate a control vector. Control vector is simply a set of numbers that represent actions each of your moving parts should perform (for example, if you have 2 voltage-controlled motors (though you probably should use PWM, which we will talk about later), a control vector [2.3, -4.5] will mean that motor1 should receive 2.3 volts, while motor2 receives -4.5 volts).
In order to explain the idea behind control theory I am going to use the classical example of the inverted pendulum. The basic idea is you have a point mass on a rigid massless rod, attached to a motor that can move it in one direction.