Hi Chris, I did similar demo before, controlling M113 tracked vehicle to follow sine shape path with PID method, the video link is (https://uwmadison.box.com/s/j93bhbnkwbdh996bi9k7stk1gisas1g2). Is this demo what you want to do (to some extend))? In this demo, I implemented a basic PD controller in the simulation loop given the information of predefined sine-shape trajectory and vehicle's current state
while I am not sure about the reason why it's not working well with PathFollowerDriver (might because of the tracked vehicle's skid steering mechanism is different from the ones one wheeled vehicle), I would recommend trying to implement a basic PID controller, which you could easily adjust PID gains given over/under damped scenarios. From experience (demo I shared above), it would work fine with a customized PID controller. Best, Harry On Wednesday, August 13, 2025 at 8:31:11 AM UTC-5 [email protected] wrote: > Hi all, > > I have been testing some of Project Chrono's features with their vehicle > module and I was curious if anyone can explain this abnormality. > > I created a file that creates a PathFollowerDriver component on the M113 > tracked vehicle to test how the PID controller works. I started with a > straight line path first and was able to get some pretty solid results with > the chosen gains. When I transitioned the same gains to a more complicated > path (the Double Lane Change Path) the previous gains that I had were too > harsh and veered the M113 off of the desired path. > > Comparing that to the wheeled vehicle, no matter the maneuver chosen, the > same gains can be used and the wheeled vehicle would be able to follow the > path from beginning to end with little difficulty. My first thought as to > why this may be happening is because of the time step difference in > simulations (2e-3 in the wheeled vs. 5e-4 in the tracked), but I was > wondering if anyone else may have some thoughts behind what may be going on. > > Thank you, > Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ProjectChrono" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/projectchrono/7600dd11-a7b8-4e50-9120-9b86e46829c8n%40googlegroups.com.
