Home▸Engineering & Materials▸Cruise Control: PI Controller and Integral Windup

🚗 Cruise Control: PI Controller and Integral Windup

Tune the proportional and integral gains of a cruise-control loop and watch a car's speed response overshoot, settle, or suffer integral windup on a hill.

Engineering & Materials3DModerate60 FPS

A 3D car drives along a road whose grade you control, held at a target speed by a live proportional-integral (PI) controller — tune the gains and watch it overshoot, settle, or wind up on a hill.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

The proportional term reacts to present error, the integral term erases steady-state offset by accumulating past error, and on a steep hill the actuator saturates — causing integral windup unless an anti-windup clamp is engaged.

🎮 How to Use

Set a target speed, adjust K_p and K_i, then drag the road grade to simulate a hill. Watch the dashboard gauges, throttle/integral bars, and the live speed-vs-time chart respond.

💡 Did You Know?

Most production cruise-control systems use anti-windup logic precisely because a saturated integrator, left unchecked, causes exactly the kind of overshoot you can trigger here by turning the clamp off.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D car-on-road simulation where users tune the proportional and integral gains of a cruise-control loop and watch speed response overshoot, settle, or suffer integral windup on a hill.

pi-controllercruise-controlintegral-windupcontrol-systemsfeedback-controlengineering

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install