Optimering av styrsystem för DC-servo

Sammanfattning: Automatic control is used to operate all kinds of processes: everything from temperature in houses to the control of robots. The course in automatic control in Uppsala University includes laboratory experiments where students conduct tests on a wheel controlled by a, so called, PID-controller which is one of the most widely used control mechanisms. This is a prime opportunity for students to get practical experience of working with PID-regulators and test how different parameters influence results. That system has been improved in this project as there were previously several issues with the system. The system was buggy and one of the tasks where the students are to test the systems’ reaction to oscillating input signals was cancelled because that feature had not been implemented yet. These issues were successfully fixed in this project and all tasks are now doable. Another problem was (and is still to some degree) that a lot of measurement noise occurs when measuring speed. This in turn causes the part of the controller that is sensitive to noise (the derivative part, for those familiar with PID-controllers) to function poorly. Some improvement has been made to this by using low-pass filtering for control purposes and the least square method for display purposes, but the signal is still noisy. The key to solving this issue lies in implementing an algorithm that can precisely estimate the speed without distorting any other information, or alternatively buy sensors with higher precision.