Model-free practical PI-Lead control design by ultimate sensitivity principle

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical, model-free method for designing robust PI-Lead controllers using ultimate sensitivity principles, relying solely on experimental data and loop characteristics.

Contribution

It presents a simple three-step procedure for tuning PI-Lead controllers without system modeling, ensuring phase margin through empirical loop monitoring.

Findings

Effective control design demonstrated on a noise-perturbed electro-mechanical system.

Method guarantees phase margin without system identification.

Controller parameters tuned solely via experimental output monitoring.

Abstract

Practical design and tuning of feedback controllers has often to get by without a model of the dynamic process at hand. Only some general assumptions about the system dynamics, in this work type-one stable, can be available for engineers, for instance in motion control applications and many others. This paper proposes a practical and simple in realization procedure for designing a robust PI-Lead control without modeling. The developed method derives from the ultimate sensitivity principles, known in empirical Ziegler-Nichols tuning of PID controllers, and makes use of some general characteristics of the loop shaping. A three-steps procedure is proposed to determine the integration time constant, control gain, and Lead-element in a way to guarantee a sufficient phase margin, while all steps are served by only experimental monitoring of the output value. Proposed method is demonstrated and discussed with experiments accomplished on a noise-perturbed electro-mechanical actuator system.