AHHHHHHHHHHH

I swear this thing was NOT here this morning!

But now there’s a 10-story crane poking around a few yards from my window. The reach on the boom is easily enough to drop something on top of this building.

It was a stump in the ground and four posts last night. These things grow fast.

PID controllers!

I just realized that some of the work we have been doing in 6.01 with state machines is getting pretty close to forming parts of a PID controller. I have been curious about those things, and have a grasp of how they work, but have yet to actually implement one to solidify said grasp. I suspect it might be coming up soon, since it is a very common control scheme.

This would be pretty neat for experimentation, as the only autonomous bots I’ve built to date have used proportional control only with an enormous deadband to avoid oscillation, or some sort of 3/8ths-ass fuzzy logic (not even half-ass).

Bets on when I’ll send one of the lab robots through the wall?