Awesome

Controls Engineering in the FIRST Robotics Competition

Graduate-level control theory for high schoolers

When I was a high school student on FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team 3512, I had to learn control theory from scattered internet sources that either weren't rigorous enough or assumed too much prior knowledge. After I took graduate-level control theory courses from University of California, Santa Cruz for my bachelor's degree, I realized that the concepts weren't difficult when presented well, but the information wasn't broadly accessible outside academia.

I wanted to fix the information disparity so more people could appreciate the beauty and elegance I saw in control theory. This book streamlines the learning process to make that possible.

I wrote the initial draft of this book as a final project for an undergraduate technical writing class I took at UCSC in Spring 2017 (CMPE 185). It was a 13-page IEEE-formatted paper intended as a reference manual and guide to state-space control that summarized the three graduate controls classes I had taken that year. I kept working on it the following year to flesh it out, and it eventually became long enough to make into a proper book. I've been adding to it ever since as I learn new things.

I contextualized the material within FRC because it's always been a significant part of my life, and it's a useful application sandbox. I maintain implementations of many of this book's tools in the FRC standard library (WPILib).

Download

A PDF version is available at https://controls-in-frc.link (full link: https://file.tavsys.net/control/controls-engineering-in-frc.pdf).

Printed copies

As per this work's license, you may print copies yourself for any purpose under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Printing a copy of the PDF as-is satisfies the license requirements.

This book should be printed on A5 paper. Use the printer version of the PDF here instead of the one linked above because the latter is compressed for electronic viewing.

Running the examples

Example Python scripts can be obtained from frccontrol's Git repository at https://github.com/calcmogul/frccontrol/tree/main/examples. Furthermore, all scripts in the code directory are runnable by the user. They require Python 3.5+ and frccontrol. frccontrol can be installed with the following command.

pip3 install --user frccontrol

Some also use bookutil, a Python package containing common utilities for this book. That can be installed by running pip3 install --user -e bookutil from the root of this Git repository.

The scripts can be run as follows:

./elevator.py

Some Linux platforms use tk as a backend for matplotlib, so that may need to be installed to see the plots.

Compiling the book

Install the dependencies via one of the following commands:

• ./setup_archlinux.sh
• ./setup_ubuntu.sh
• ./setup_macos.sh

Run make to generate a PDF named controls-engineering-in-frc-ebook.pdf.

Style guide

All LaTeX labels, including bibliography entries, should use underscores to represent spaces between words instead of hyphens. Hyphens should only be used where the character being written is already a hyphen. .tex file names should use hyphens and .py file names should use underscores.

When including linebreaks in equations, insert the linebreak and a \qquad before the next operator.

Glossary entries in glossary-entries.tex should be lexographically sorted by entry key. The entry key should be the same as the name. The words in the name should be lowercase, and the description should start with a capital letter and end with a period. The first sentence should be a fragment, but sentences after that, if applicable, should be complete.

Bibliography entries in controls-engineering-in-frc.bib should be sorted lexographically by label. Links to online videos should use the @misc tag. Links to online static resources like PDFs should use the @online tag.

Book content should answer the question why something works the way it does and how and when to use it to solve problems.

Adhere to SI unit rules and style conventions.

Future improvements

See TODO.md.

Licensing

This project, except for the software, is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The software is released under the 3-clause BSD license.