readme.md

CartPole

Overview

This is a student project that is designed to learn the basics of robotics and control theory. The environment is some variation of the cart-pole problem described by Barto, Sutton, and Anderson. A pole is attached by an joint to a cart, which moves along guide axis. Some stepper drives the cart. The control target is desired acceleration of the cart.

The cart starts at the middle with no velocity and acceleration. The pole is initially at rest state. The goal is to swing up the pole and maintain it in upright pose by increasing and reducing the cart's velocity.

Also there is radial variation, where cart moves in a circle.

Interface

We declare a common interface both for simulator and control. It allows us to easily train model and make inference on device, use transfer learning, generate real training samples and etc.

State

Field	Unit	Description
positon	m	Position of the cart along the guide axis. The middle is a reference point.
velocity	m/s	Instantaneous linear speed of the cart.
accelerration	m/s^2	Instantaneous acceleration of the cart.
pole_angle	rad	Angle of pole (ccw). The he lowest position is the reference point.
pole_velocity	rad/s	Instantaneous angular velocity of the pole.
error_code	enum	Current error code

Error code

Code	Int	Description
NO_ERROR	0	Position of the cart along the guide axis. The middle is a reference point.
NEED_RESET	1	Environment loose control (use soft or hard reset).
X_OVERFLOW	2	The maximum allowed position is achieved.
V_OVERFLOW	3	The maximum allowed velocity is achieved.
A_OVERFLOW	4	The maximum allowed acceleration is achieved.
MOTOR_STALLED	5	Some problems with stepper.
ENDSTOP_HIT	6	The cart has touched one of endstop hit.