Experimental Evaluation of Automatic Tuning of PID Controllers for an Electro-Mechanical System

Integrating processes are widely encountered in electro-mechanical systems and other areas. Automatic tuning of PID controllers for this type of system requires special consideration since the underlying system is unstable. Using relay feedback control in a closed-loop setting, an auto-tuner is designed to systematically find the controller parameters using a frequency sampling filter model. The performance of this auto-tuner is evaluated on an electro-mechanical experimental test facility that can be configured to operate in either as a single-input, single-output or multiple-input, multiple output system. The experimental results demonstrate that when the interaction the between control loops is weak, the auto-tuner produces closed-loop performance that matches the specification, but this performance gradually decays as the level of interaction increases. The experimental results can also serve as experimental benchmarks to compare competing designs. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.