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The whole point of PID is any idiot can tweak things to make it work.

Ph.D means you're doing something like:

* H2-optimization and optimal controls

* System ID

* Intuitive classical controls (Bode obstacle course, Nyquist, root-locus, etc.)

* Fancy discrete state-space methods / search / shortest path

* Machine learning, and the thing training itself

... and so on. PID is nice since it's idiot-friendly.

(And even with a Ph.D and a complete understanding of all of the above, it's often more fun or efficient to be an idiot and just use PID; I've never seen a place where PID was the right answer, but it's oh-so-often a good-enough answer)



> PID is nice since it's idiot-friendly

It may be idiot friendly, but boy do I wish the idiots who did the noise cancellation on my earphones had heard of integrator windup.


For many systems the optimal PD can be seen as the right answer (LQR)


Z-transforms or bust!




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