Heuristic control of a small line-following robot : A comparison of different methods

Sammanfattning: A line-follower is a robot that follows a line. Line-followers can be used in industry, mostly for material transportation, but are also raced against each other in competitions. While line-followers used in industry prioritize smooth motion and accuracy, competition-style line-followers prioritize speed around the track. In order for a line-follower to perform well, it needs a robust control-algorithm. Usually, competition-style line-followers use a manually tuned PID-algorithm for control. Tuning a PID-controller can be difficult, and is dependent on the skill of the tuner. There are, however, multiple so called ”heuristic” tuning methods that can give more consistent results, quickly. In this work, some popular heuristic tuning methods have been investigated for control of a competition-style line-follower. The methods have been compared in terms of step-responses and cumulative deviation of the robot from a track. The results indicate that the purely proportional variant of the Ziegler-Nichols method gives the best performance for competition-style line-followers. The ”some overshoot” variant of the modified Ziegler-Nichols method gave the most consistent and accurate results, and could be appropriate for use in an industrial-scale line-follower. Surprisingly the newest method tested, the Tyreus-Luyben technique, had a very unstable behaviour, and have thus been excluded from multiple tests.