Mission Disambiguation
Welcome to vehicle controls! This page is meant to be an “all the things” for controls. Feel free to grab a coffee, sit down and feel at home, this page is for you!
Building a Unified Controls Team
Section titled “Building a Unified Controls Team”Motivation
Section titled “Motivation”In its most abstract formulation, controls is concerned with a single problem: given a desired vehicle state, produce a set of inputs that most closely achieves that request while respecting a set of constraints over a given time horizon.
Framed this way, drivered and driverless controls emerge as seemingly identical problems with different sources of reference (in the case of DV path-planning’s trajectory, and in the case of EV the driver’s hands and feet), with everything downstream being identical. Given our driverless and electric vehicles share the same chassis, suspension, drivetrain, and firmware, in adddition to the integrated direction FSAE is going, it is only natural to unify the two teams into a single effort that pools our analysis resources, knowledge base, and engineering talent! Of course this is a huge simplification of an extremely difficult engineering problem, but join along for the ride!
New Scope
Section titled “New Scope”Controls will now own:
- Trajectory Planning (driverless)
- Torque Vectoring
- State Estimation (mainly slip angle & slip Ratio)
- Regen Balance
- DRS
- CarMaker SIL/HIL
Majority of the work we do is in the driverless and energetics monorepos!
For a more granular view of the work that we do, check out Who Owns What?
Controls Goals for 27x
Section titled “Controls Goals for 27x”High-level Focus Areas
Section titled “High-level Focus Areas”- Create software that helps us better understand the vehicle state during and post vehicle operation; construct ways to quantify the effectiveness of the software we write.
- Design and implement intuitive tuning interfaces that directly correlate to vehicle performance characteristics.
- Build out robust suite of testing platforms to validate every line of code we deploy to the vehicle.
Time Goals
Section titled “Time Goals”- Accel
- Skidpad
- AutoX
- Endurance
Team Structure
Section titled “Team Structure”We will be trialling the DV ticket system for managing controls tasks next year. This will be used during the Summer/Fall, but I will make changes if necessary when it seems like this structure is not sufficient for our needs. Feedback on how you like this new ticketing structure will be very much appreciated!
Ticket Based Tasking
Section titled “Ticket Based Tasking”All projects will be broken down in to incremental task-driven tickets that will be assigned to controls members; the hope is that a ticket-driven approach to assigning work will help relieve the burden of members having to pace their own projects, it also makes it easier for me to check-in on and track deliverables.
System Leads
Section titled “System Leads”Controls will still have system leads next year but they will function more like system owners. This allows for the flexibility of working beyond your system, and should allow for system leads to accumulate more knowledge across all domains as they work on tickets that span the range of controls.