Feedback Control Solutions for an Electromechanical Process with Rigid Body Dynamics

The paper presents three design methods for the position control of a mechatronics application characterized by rigid body dynamics and a discontinuously variable parameter (inertia). The techniques are useful because the control structure with state feedback does not assure reduced settling times, phase margins of 60 degrees (or smaller) and a zero steady-state control error. The Modulus Optimum method (MO-m) is applied to initially tune the parameters of the continous-time controllers and the backwards difference method is used for discretizing these parameters. A set of digital and experimental results for the position control systems using the proposed and developed control solutions validate the suggested techniques. A comparative analysis of the three proposed control structures is also given in order to highlight how the specified control system performance was achieved.