Lateral Acceleration to steering controller

Hi, I’m looking for some explanation about the controller that takes lateral acceleration from L1 controller and output command to the steering motors. Is it a PID controller? Is acceleration on the body Y axis the measured variable? is angular velocity the output of that controller?

Thank!

Hi @elgarbe,

The AR_AttitudeController’s get_turn_rate_from_lat_accel function converts a lateral acceleration (and forward speed) into a turn rate. If you search through the code you should find a couple of places where this conversion is used to turn the output from the position or navigation controller into an input that the lower level turn-rate controller can accept.

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Oh, ok, so the low level pid controllers are for forward velocity and for angular velocity (turn rate)?

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@elgarbe,

yes, that’s right. There is a vague plan to add a lateral velocity controller for omni vehicles but no coding has been done yet.

Ok, understand. And what about linear velocity? is it a PID that try to get the distance to the next desired point equal to 0, outputting a linear velocity to the motors?
how about the mixing of the output of each controller?

Thank!

@elgarbe,

We have some rover information on the dev wiki here although the page on navigation still talks about the L1 controller which has been replaced by “SCurves” in 4.3.

I guess when you say, “linear velocity” you mean, “how is the vehicle’s forward speed controlled?” and the simple answer is that there are multiple levels.

  1. There’s a navigation layer (AR_WPNav) that uses SCurves to calculate the desired position, velocity and acceration at each moment on the journey from the origin to the destination.
  2. Then there is a position controller which uses a PID controller which is responsible for calculating the turn rate and forward-back speed to move the vehicle from wherever it actually is to be at the position, velocity and acceleration provided by AR_WPNav.
  3. Then there are two low level controllers (one for turn rate, one for forward-back speed) which use PID controllers to convert the desired turn rate and forward-back speed into high level steering and throttle outputs (expressed as percentages).
  4. These two outputs are then passed into the low level AR_MotorsUGV class where they are converted into individual motor and servo outputs.

@rmackay9, thank for the information. I would like to take a look at point 2. Is there some theory about the implementation? if not, can you point me out to the code of this controller?
What about scurves, have you got a paper or some other theoretical information?

Thank

Hi @elgarbe,

Here are some links that may help