So, last time we saw that the PI regulator, or its slightly more elaborate brother,

the PID regulator, was enough to make the cruise controller do what it should do.
Which is, achieve stability, tracking and parameter robustness. Today I want to
talk a little bit more about PID control. And, the reason for that is, this
regulator is such an important regulator or controller that's out there in
virtually every industry you can think of, there is a PID regulator going on
underneath the hood in almost all controllers. And, there are really three knobs
you can tweak here. One is KP, which is the proportional gain. The other's kI which
is the integral gain and then kD which is the derivative gain. And I want to talk a
little bit about what are the effects of these gains? Well first of all P As we
saw. It's a contributor to stability. In the sense that, it makes the system, not
guaranteed. But it's helping out to make the system stable. And it's, it's making
it responsive in the sense that. You respond if someone, if you click, or press 70
miles per hour on your cruise controller. It drives the system towards that value.
I'm calling it medium rate responsiveness. Because it's not super fast. And the
speed. In fact, the rate of responsiveness is a function of how big kp is. But as
you saw, it wasn't typically enough to achieve tracking. But the I component is
really. Good for tracking and in fact if your system is stable than having an eye
component is enough to assure tracking in almost all cases. It's also extremely
effective at rejecting disturbances so that integral part is a very effective Part
to have in your controller. Now it's much slower in the sense that you have to
accumulate over time errors to respond to them because it's an integral. So it, it
re, responds slower and there is a very there is a little bit of a warning I need
to make there, by making k i large. You may very well induce oscillation so this is
not, oh I'm going to pick all of the Them. A million and go home. Yo u have to be a
little careful in how you actually select, select these gates. Now the d part,
well, since it's not responding to actual values, their values but the change is in
their values, it's typically faster responsiveness, so something is about to
happen. Well, the rate is changing so the, the derivative part kicks in typically
faster. now there is a little caveat to this. And that's the derivative is
sensitive to noise. Because if you have a signal that's noisy then if you compute
the derivative of that signal you're going to get rather aggressive derivatives
that don't necessarily correspond to what the non noisy signal would be. So you
have to be a little careful with the d part. So making KD too large is typically an
invitation to disaster because you're, you're over reacting to, to noise. So, the
last thing I want to point out though is when you put this together you get PID
which is already by far the most used low level controller. Low level means
whenever you have a DC motor somewhere and you want to make it do something
Somewhere there is a PID leak. Whenever you have a chemical processing plant for
getting the right concentrations in your chemicals, somewhere there is a PID
regulator. It's almost everywhere there, or in almost all control applications, PID
shows up under the hood in some form or another. But, I do want to point out, that
this is not a one-size-fits all. We can't guarantee stability with a PID regulator.
Sometimes it's not enough. In fact, when we go to complicated Robotic systems, the
PID regulator will typically not be enough by itself. So we need to do a lot of
more thinking and modeling to, to use it and at this point we actually don't really
know how to pick these gains. However, I want to point out that this is a very,
very useful type of controller. And since it is a feedback lob because it depends
upon the error it actually fights uncertainty model parameters in a remarkable way
and the feedback has this remarkable ability to overcome the fact that we don't
know gamma, we don't know c, we don't know m. But still, we seem to do well when we
design controllers for a wide range of, of these parameters. So having said that,
let's hook it up to our car and in fact we had a PID regulator for velocity control
on the urban challenge vehicle, Sting 1 as it's called. We had this model that
we've already seen, and I pick It's completely random and arbitrary numbers here
for the parameters. I even put r equals to 1, so we're going to go 1 mile per hour.
let's say 1 meter per second. it really doesn't matter These are arbitrary values.
Just so you'll see what's going on. So, if we start with our friend The p regulator
so we have kp = 1 here and all the other gains are 0 then well, we don't actually
make it up to 1 we only make it 2 - 0.1. This we had already seen. So the p part by
itself was not enough to, to both be stable and achieve tracking. Well, that's Ok
in the i part. It's cruise-controller again kp is 1, kI is 1 and now we are having
a very nice so called step response which means we are responding, we are waking up
and then we are hitting it with a step, in this case the step of height 1 or 70 if
its 70 miles per hour. so then this thing makes it's way up and it stays up there
perfect. So this is actually a good and successful design right here. Now ,if this
is so good why don't we make ki higher to make it even better? Well if I To crank
up KI to 10. Then, all of a sudden, my system starts oscillating. So this is an
example of where the integral part may actually cause oscillations. Which is, we
should at least be aware of this fact. And be a little careful when we tweak our
parameters. And if we see oscillations That is a. Clear indication that the
integral part is typically a little bit too large. What about the d part? Well,
let's add the d part. In this case, it actually doesn't matter too much. What you
see here is that I had a small d part. I'm a little bit paranoid when it comes to
large kd terms because they are a little bit Noise sensitive. But what you're
seeing here is that you're getting a faster initial response because of the
introduction of a D part, but then, we actually get almost a slower response
towards the end so the D part is there to drive it well up in the beginning, but
then So were stand in this particular application, having a d gain that's not ser,
it's not even clear if that was, was useful. But this is some of the thinking that
goes into tweeking PID regulators. So what we are going to do next time, is we're
going to go now, from this rather abstract, integrals and derivatives, to something
that we can actually implement. And we're going to see how these PID gains show up
when we control a the altitude of a hovering quad regulator..