Suitable controller for electrical drive

I want to make a feedback control on an electrical drive on a model car. Unfortunately, the drive and gearbox have a rather large latency, so finding a suitable control function is tricky. Furthermore the system behavior is non-linear (backlash when the drive is stopped) and changes over time (when battery power decreases).

With current PI controller, the system starts, overshoots and then stops again. I think with the given system the desired speed cannot be reached exactly, but I would rather have a smooth speed near the desired value than a system trying to achieve the exact value.

What kind of controller can you recommend for this kind of problem?

Reply to
Peter Bencsik
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Does the word "current" in the above sentence refer to the present, or to controlling the motor current?

How did you tune the response of the PI controller?

The I in PI is the function that is supposed to cause the actual average speed to reach the setpoint speed, eventually, if the measured variable for the controller is speed.

Motor current is roughly proportional to motor torque, so a motor current controller is handy, if you want to control how torque ramps up and down, in response to a speed error. If you cascade the setpoint of that controller to be from the output of a speed controller you can have a pretty tunable response that compensated for lots of variables, like battery voltage, motor temperature, etc.

Reply to
John Popelish

You're leaving some stuff out:

  • How are you driving the motor? - Voltage? - Current? - Continuous? - PWM?
  • What variable are you trying to control (speed, I gather, but you should state it explicitly)?
  • How are you sensing your system output? - Tachometer? - Shaft encoder? - GPS?

If you are trying to drive the thing at a constant speed then you should be able to do quite well with a PI controller. As long as the motor is always driving the backlash goes away, you should be able to ignore it unless the car is really creeping along. Ditto with friction.

If you told me "I wanna control the speed of a DC motor driving a (insert nearly anything here)" I would tell you that you want a PI or a PID controller, with either a continuous or PWM'd voltage drive, for simplicity. If you are measuring velocity then a PI should do pretty well; if you are measuring position and not differentiating it then you'll probably need a PID or a PD.

Check my web page for articles -- PID Without a PhD should be helpful, particularly if you are closing the loop with a microcontroller.

Reply to
Tim Wescott

In a general sense, The D component in a PID controller would allow you to introduce an artificial friction factor, and consequently provide some degree of dampening to any output oscillations. This could address the 'overshoot and stop' problem. Without additional data, a reliable solution is difficult. It is possible that the controller is 'saturating', that is going from one extreme to the other. An observation of the output control variable might lead to a more conclusive solution. There are various methods of data acquisition that might prove useful.

David Corliss

Reply to
David Corliss

I meant the present controller implementation, currently we did not monitor the motor current for control purposes.

Thanks for the hints, I will switch to a cascaded control based on motor current and speed - this should do the job!

-pb

Reply to
Peter Bencsik

I am driving the motor by PWM and using a tachometer to get speed and position.

The car should go on rather constant speed but very slow, so that it is "creeping along". Thus, the control loop tends to produce periodical stop-and-go cycles instead of a smooth movement. So, I would rather accept a deviation from target speed than this oscillating behavior. On the other hand I need a feedback controller in order to overcome the situation that the car does not move at all at low battery speed.

So I am looking for a configuration that achieves the speed that is closest to intended speed, while still being smooth.

Reply to
Peter Bencsik

-snip-

Ahh. You are probably running into problems with limit cycles due to friction. You want to read my article "Controlling Motors in the Presence of Friction and Backlash" at

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Your problem could be used as an example in the article. I suspect that slowing your PWM down to a suitable range, or impressing a slow PWM on your fast PWM, would go a long way to solving your problem.

Just as a side note: if I were designing your system I would probably want to use a suitably high-resolution encoder instead of a tachometer. While encoders do have resolution issues at low speeds, they _don't_ have offset issues, which means that you can command an arbitrarily low rate without having to worry about the mechanism going the wrong way or stopping.

Reply to
Tim Wescott

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