Electronic – Drive 4 DC motors off a dual drive motor controller

Your while loop logic is incompatible with the conditions inside it.

Your while loop is saying:

as long as BOTH wheel encoders read less than clicks, execute the code inside

and your if statements are saying:

if any of the wheel encoders is greater or equal to clicks, stop the corresponding motor

This is generally false except for the rare condition where one of the encoders happen to increment between the arduino evaluating the while and the if statements. In order words just about never.

So the first thing you need to do is fix your logic. Then you need to investigate more sophisticated means of keeping the wheels in sync, such as computing an error term from the different in ticks, and employing a PID controller algorithm to adjust the speed of both motors via analogWrite.

Thanks everyone for the useful comments.

I achieved what I wanted by implementing a simple velocity PID controller.

Through two interrupts (for each encoder) I calculated how much encoder ticks have been accumulated at a given time interval. The interval i used was 10ms and this was achieved by using the timer compare feature on timer1 of the AVR mcu. Encoder ticks were calculated by taking the difference of the previous encoder ticks and the current ticks. This was then used as the velocity PV of the PID controller. The PID controller sampling rate was also done at 10ms. Just to keep things simple.

I wrote a simple MATLAB gui to graph the SP, PV of the step response of the PID controller. This is how I manually tuned the PID controller. It may not be the best way but certainly the simplest way I could think of to tune the controller.

I will document this on my blog post when I get a chance and will put a link to it on this post so it will be helpful for anyone.