PID controller integral term causing extreme instability

Question

I have a PID controller running on a robot that is designed to make the robot steer onto a compass heading. The PID correction is recalculated/applied at a rate of 20Hz.

Answer 1

I'm not sure why your code isn't working, but I'm almost positive you can't test it to see why, either. You might inject a timer service so you can mock it out and see what's happening:

public interace ITimer 
{
     long GetCurrentTicks()
}

public class Timer : ITimer
{
    public long GetCurrentTicks() 
    {
        return DateTime.Now.Ticks;
    }
}

public class TestTimer : ITimer
{
    private bool firstCall = true;
    private long last;
    private int counter = 1000000000;

    public long GetCurrentTicks()
    {
        if (firstCall)
            last = counter * 10000;
        else
            last += 3500;  //ticks; not sure what a good value is here

        //set up for next call;
        firstCall = !firstCall;
        counter++;

        return last;
    }
}

Then, replace both calls to DateTime.Now.Ticks with GetCurrentTicks(), and you can step through the code and see what the values look like.