Objective Successful

I am proud to report that I and the many other people helping me were successful this evening in "closing the loop" of the controller here at Ames.  This means that we can now issue a command to the assembly, say something like, "please oscillate at 35 Hz and at a magnitude of 1 degree."  and it will do so, but you have to say please and ask in a nice voice.  =)

This is a huge step forward for the team in general and for me personally.  This evening marks the first time I have been involved with a closed-loop control project wherein we have gone through the formal experimental and modeling stages and closed-loop control design and had a reasonably high performance controller.  While I didn't get to be involved as much as I would have liked to be in the controller (due to time), I was able to add a modifying controller (an "outer loop") that boosted one of the weaknesses of the inner controller, which was nice to be able to contribute.

One of my mentors, Hossein, and I spent this whole weekend working through the varioius implementation details including safety mechanisms, etc and we finally got the system breathing Sunday evening at about 9pm!  whew!  (the demonstration is taking place at 2pm on Monday...)

This is a funny cartoon kinda showing what closed-loop control is all about, a good reference for those reading this who have no idea what i'm talking about.

Well, I'm gonna hit the hay.  Happy trails partner!

Gavino