nikolasent/pid-controller

Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. Project: PID controller

PID controller

This Project is the ninth task (Project 4 of Term 2) of the Udacity Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program. The main goal of the project is to implement PID controller in C++ to steer the self driving car around the track in a Simulator v. 0.1.1.

The project was created with the Udacity Starter Code.

About PID controller

A PID (Proportional, Integral, Derivative) controller is a control loop feedback controller which is widely used in different control systems.

Error is an input variable for the controller:

cte = desired_state - measured_state

With the proportional band (P) only, the PID controller output is proportional to the cte. It takes into account only the present value of cte. Thanks to this part of controller, it is able to steer in the correct direction.

Integral term (I) takes into account the integral of cte over the past time. It is used to reduce systematic bias. From my experianse of PID tuning on real-world systems and some experiments in the simulator, it was found out that we do not need to compute the integral for all time, but calculate it over only last n frames. In other case, we can accumulate errors because of left turns prevalens which can result in different behaviour of the controller during multi lap drive and even going off the track. A buffer was implemented for the purpose using the code from stackoverflow.

With derivative (D) part, the controller output is proportional to the rate of change of cte (its derivative). The parameter is used to reduce overshooting and dump oscillations caused by the P.

While the PID controller is easy to implement, but it is not so easy to tune.

How it was tuned

Initially, the controller was tuned with so-called Ziegler–Nichols method. Generally speaking, it requires to set Kd and Ki to 0 and gradually increase Kp before the car runs with stable and consistent oscillations. This value of Kp and the oscillation period can be used to calculate optimal pid controller parameters by the method. Unfortunatly, the controller with resulted parameters was able to drive car around the track but with a lot of wobbling. That is why, parameters were further tuned manually by try-and-error process.

The same process was applied for differnt speed, so different PID parameters were found for different speed. The results were linearized The same process was applied for different speed, so different PID parameters were found for different speed. The results were linearized in order to make the parameters automatically tune with the car speed variation.

The implementation also takes into account different time intervals between data frames.

Dependencies

• cmake >= 3.5
• All OSes: click here for installation instructions
• make >= 4.1
  • Linux: make is installed by default on most Linux distros
  • Mac: install Xcode command line tools to get make
  • Windows: Click here for installation instructions
• gcc/g++ >= 5.4
  • Linux: gcc / g++ is installed by default on most Linux distros
  • Mac: same deal as make - [install Xcode command line tools]((https://developer.apple.com/xcode/features/)
  • Windows: recommend using MinGW
• uWebSockets == 0.13, but the master branch will probably work just fine
  • Follow the instructions in the uWebSockets README to get setup for your platform. You can download the zip of the appropriate version from the releases page. Here's a link to the v0.13 zip.
  • If you run OSX and have homebrew installed you can just run the ./install-mac.sh script to install this
• Simulator. You can download these from the project intro page in the classroom.

Basic Build Instructions

1. Clone this repo.
2. Make a build directory: mkdir build && cd build
3. Compile: cmake .. && make
4. Run it: ./pid.

Editor Settings

We've purposefully kept editor configuration files out of this repo in order to keep it as simple and environment agnostic as possible. However, we recommend using the following settings:

• indent using spaces
• set tab width to 2 spaces (keeps the matrices in source code aligned)

Code Style

Please (do your best to) stick to Google's C++ style guide.

Hints!

• You don't have to follow this directory structure, but if you do, your work will span all of the .cpp files here. Keep an eye out for TODOs.