Introduction

This chapter introduces the control loop as the central organizing idea behind robotic autonomy. You will start with the Sense-Plan-Act paradigm that structures how robots turn sensor data into physical action, then contrast open-loop and closed-loop control as two fundamental approaches to commanding a robot’s motion. The chapter concludes with Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control, the algorithm most widely used to close that loop in practice. By the end, you should be able to describe how information and commands flow through a robot during operation, and how a PID controller combines present, past, and predicted error to keep a robot on target.