Hello again, this is Max Archer, the Director of Special Projects for Student Space Systems, reporting in. Student Space Systems is a student organization at the University of Illinois that’s trying to get to space, but we have a lot of work to do before we can get there. Last week, my team working on the reaction control system was looking into control system software that can run on our Arduino to keep a rocket stable. What their research turned up was pretty interesting.
A PID control algorithm is a fairly commonly used way to control linear things in industry. It’s a real-time way of keeping an output at a steady state that’s tunable for tons of different applications. It works by taking the portions of the error (the difference between the output and what you want the output to be), its derivative, and its integral, and combining those to get the new setting of whatever actuator affects the output. It’s easier to describe in more concrete terms, but I highly recommend looking up the wikipedia page for it.
Anyway, we’re going to start looking into how to implement this on the Arduino this week, as well as ironing out a few bugs we’re still having with the electronics hardware. None of this would be possible without Element14’s generous support, so thank you Element14 for the help!
