> but I do find that PID and Kalman etc end up in places where a few if statements end up being just as good.
PID implementation isn't that much more complicated than a few if statements. In fact that's often were many solutions to control problem starts. Once one notes that the degree of control achieved is unsatisfactory one starts toying with that ad-hoc if statement based bang-bang control implementation, for example, overshoot problems, problems of not reaching the set point. So you add some inertia, you add some damping, you accumulate the cumulative error to counter it and behold you have reinvented a PID controller.
Math just formalizes and gives structure to this iterative rediscovery of PID control.
Yes obtaining the optimally tuned parameters isnt straightforward for an actuall messy system, but even with suboptimal parameters PID controller performance is often quite satisfactory.
PID implementation isn't that much more complicated than a few if statements. In fact that's often were many solutions to control problem starts. Once one notes that the degree of control achieved is unsatisfactory one starts toying with that ad-hoc if statement based bang-bang control implementation, for example, overshoot problems, problems of not reaching the set point. So you add some inertia, you add some damping, you accumulate the cumulative error to counter it and behold you have reinvented a PID controller.
Math just formalizes and gives structure to this iterative rediscovery of PID control.
Yes obtaining the optimally tuned parameters isnt straightforward for an actuall messy system, but even with suboptimal parameters PID controller performance is often quite satisfactory.