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Flatness-based Trajectory Generation and Tracking for a DC motor drives using MPC
Chinde Venkatesh,Kanakgiri Krishna,Tiwari Deepak,K Rajesh,S.Ayush
Electrical Engineering Department Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (V.J.T.I) Matunga Mumbai-400019 Email: chanti.venky47@gmail.com

AbstractThis paper proposes the speed control of a separately excited dc motor by varying armature voltage. The novelty of this paper lies in the application of Flatness(trajectory generation) and Model predictive control(MPC) for tracking the desired speed reference. The dynamic system of DC motor is shown to be differentially at viewed from the angular velocity, which is a at output. It is thus possible to exploit the at property of the system in which at output provides a framework for generating a smooth reference trajectory for the angular velocity. The rotor speed of the dc motor can be made to follow this selected trajectory. The purpose is to achieve accurate trajectory control of the speed. In order to achieve high performance speed tracking, linear MPC is designed to track the reference speed without overshoot. The aim of the proposed scheme is to improve tracking performance of DC motor. With the proposed control scheme, the system possesses the advantages of good speed tracking performance and the simulation results have proved the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

I. I NTRODUCTION The development of high performance motor drives is very important in industrial applications. Generally, a high performance motor drive system must have good dynamic speed command tracking and load regulating response. DC motor is considered a SISO system having torque/speed characteristics compatible with most mechanical loads. This makes a DC motor controllable over a wide range of speeds by proper adjustment of its terminal voltage. They have been widely used in many industrial applications such as electric vehicles, steel rolling mills, electric cranes, and robotic manipulators due to precise, wide, simple, and continuous control characteristics. Recently, brushless DC motors, induction motors, and synchronous motors have gained widespread use in electric traction. However, there is a persistent effort towards making them behave like DC motors through innovative design and control strategies. Hence DC motors are always a good proving ground for advanced control algorithm because the theory is extendable to other types of motors. Traditionally rheostatic armature control method was widely used for the speed control of low power DC motors. However the controllability, cheapness, higher efciency, and higher current carrying capabilities of static power converters brought a major change in the performance of electrical drives. The desired torque-speed characteristics could be achieved by the use of conventional PID [1-2] controllers. As PID controllers require exact mathematical modeling, the performance of the

system is questionable if there is parameter variation. In recent years neural network controllers (NNC)[1-2] were effectively introduced to improve the performance of nonlinear systems. Here we concentrate on separately excited dc motor drive systems which are commonly operated with the torque control. Closed loop drives may be employed for speed control or position control, and requires the feedback speed signal from the pulse encoders or tachogenerators. Because of these facts, the use of a transducer may be limited to work can adversely affect the stable performance of the motor. The atness property, introduced in 1992, presents a new point of view in the control theory domain [3-5]. This property, developed initially in the nonlinear continuous-time case, denes a class of systems well known as at systems. The existence of a variable called at or linearizing output allows to dene all other system variables. In the linear case [5], it is sufcient to consider the Brunovskys outputs of the canonical controllability form like the at outputs . Thus, the dynamics of such a process can be deduced without solving differential equations. Therefore, it is possible to express the state, as well as the input system, as differential functions of the at output. The main contribution of the atness that will be exploited in this paper is the effective trajectory planning and tracking solutions with high performances specication. With reference to above background, the atness-based motion planning has also received a lot of attention resulting in the earlier work reported by many researchers [6-9]. Although this technique has been applied to several nonlinear and linear mechanical systems [6-9] its application to control of DC motor speed has been the major issue .The atness based approach uses the characterization of system dynamics to generate a suitable output. In a situation where the output does not have a physical meaning or interpretation, the linearization could be done through a measurable system component that has a relationship to it. This control scheme retains the global stability due to a signicance of at output and the improvement of the performance due to MPC which uses receding horizon control principle (RHC). In this paper an attempt has been made to highlight the importance of atness concept for motion planning problems and usefulness of MPC for tracking the targets. The positioning systems control problems represent a wide domain of applications. The development of fast

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processors opens up the possibilities to further apply advanced techniques for the control of the electrical drives. Usually the PID controllers are used with success but their tuning turns to be error-prone when constraints have to be considered. The control laws based on the receding horizon principle can improve and optimize the performances of the control scheme due to their prediction capabilities and most important, can handle constraints due to their time-domain formulation. The more advanced control schemes of MPC can better track changes[10] on the set point because it has knowledge on how the set point is going to change and how the system reacts to a given change in the control variable. When working with nonlinearities and multiple inputs and outputs this offers a set of smaller, easier-to-handle control problems that PID algorithms cannot address. A method using atness combined with MPC has been proposed in this paper.The method includes computation of the at output and its trajectory and by combining the advantage of MPC (open loop control) in tracking the speed reference for DC motor has been presented. The proposed atness combined with MPC strategy for trajectory generation and tracking is validated using MATLAB simulation results for a DC motor. The simulation results have proved the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, by tracking the desired reference without overshoot. The total paper is divided into six major sections starting from rst introduction. The section II emphasize on atness-based control strategy. Section III gives brief overview of RHC scheme while section IV gives the proposed strategy for trajectory generation and tracking. Section V gives MATLAB simulation results and some observations and section VI concludes the paper with future scope of work. II. FLATNESS-BASED CONTROL STRATEGY A. Flatness basics Let us informally introduce the meaning of the atness notion. A nonlinear system is described by a (nite) set of differential equations. Fl (z, ..., z(i) , ..., z(vl ) ) = 0, l = 1, ..., N. Broadly speaking, the notion of atness [11] corresponds to the following: a nonlinear system is called at if there exists a collection y = (y1 , ..., ym ) (where m is the number of independent inputs in the system) of functions, called a at output, with the following three properties: 1) The components of y can be expressed in terms of the system variables z via differential relations of the type yi = Pi (z, ..., z(i ) ) for i = 1, . . . ,m. 2) The components of y are differentially independent, i.e. they are not related by any (non-trivial) differential equation Q(y, ..., y() ) = 0. 3) Every variable zi used to describe the system, for instance states or inputs, are directly expressed from y using only differentiations. In other words, any such zi satises a relation of the type zi = R(y, ..., y() ). The third property yields a simple solution to the problem of tracking the collection of reference trajectories yr (t) =

(y1r (t), ..., ymr (t)). The second property ensures that the different components of yr (t) can be chosen independently. B. Denition for systems with state and input This notion can also be dened, for the case of systems with a state x and controls u by Denition: The system x = fi (x, u) i=1,2,3.....n with x Rn and u Rm is differentially at if there exists a set of variables, called a at output, y = h(x, u, u, ..., u(r) ), y Rm , r N such that

= A(y, y, ...y(x ) )

u = B(y, y, ...y(u ) ) with q an integer, and such that the system equations
dA (q+1) ) = dt (y, y, ..., y

f (A(y, y, ..., y(q) ), B(y, y, ..., y(q+1) ))

are identically satised. The unique feature of allowing a parameterization of all system variables makes of atness a tool for analysis revealing the nature of each system variable in its isolated relation with a centrally important set of variables from viewpoint of controllability and observability. The invertible parameterization, involved in the at outputs denition, thus creates a local bijection between system state solutions and arbitrary trajectories in the at output space. There is no uniqueness of the at output even if there is usually a favorite at output expressing physical properties. The concept of atness can be seen as a nonlinear generalization of the Kalmans controllability and of the Brunovsky decomposition. Hence, every linear controllable system is at. This paper is aimed at showing that, for DC motor control, a quite standard application of control, described by a single input linear system, the atness-based approach (for generating reference trajectories) combined with receding horizon scheme (tracking) may dramatically improve its performance in a transient phase.

Fig(1):A standard DC motor

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The differential equations characterizing a classical DC motor system [5]are given by dI dt dw J dt L = U RI Kw = KI Kv w Cr (1) (2)

C. Flatness and feedback linearization A characterization of at systems that appears very useful for stabilized trajectory tracking is the following Proposition: A system is at if, and only if, it is linearizable by endogenous feedback and change of coordinates. A dynamic feedback is called endogenous if it does not include any external dynamics. More precisely Denition: Consider the dynamics x = fi (x, u). The feed back u = (x, z, v) z = (x, z, v) is called endogenous if the open loop dynamcis x = fi (x, u) is equivalent to the closed loop dynamics x = f (x, (x, z, v)) z = (x, z, v) (7) (8)

where K is torque constant while inductance L and resistance R, are assumed to be constant. Its inertia is denoted by J and its coefcient of viscous friction Kv . An unknown resistive torque Cr is applied to the motor. The current through the motor is denoted by I ,the angular speed by w and the input voltage by U, the control variable. At the initial time ti we have w(ti ) = w(ti )=0, and, at the nal time t f (the duration is noted T = t f ti ), we want the motor to reach the angular speed w(t f ) = w f ,with w(t f ) =0. A set of state variables for the system may be chosen to be: x1 = I , x2 = w and Cr =0 (recall that the resistive torque is unknown) we have, d dt x1 x2 =
R L K J K L Kv J

x1 x2

1 L

Two systems are called equivalent if there exists a invertible transformation wich exchanges their trajectories. III. BRIEF REVIEW OF RECEDING HORIZON SCHEME A. Introduction In many control problems it is desired to design a stabilizing feedback such that a performance criterion is minimized while satisfying constraints on the controls and the states. Ideally one would look for a closed solution for the feedback satisfying the constraints while minimizing the performance. However, often the closed solution can not be found analytically, even in the unconstrained case since it involves the solution of the corresponding Hamilton Jacobi-Bellmann equations. One approach to circumvent this problem is the repeated solution of an open-loop optimal control problem for a given state. The rst part of the resulting open-loop input signal is implemented and the whole process is repeated. Control approaches using this strategy are referred to as model predictive control (MPC), moving horizon control or receding horizon control. B. Basic operation

(3)

The controllability matrix of the system, and its inverse, are readily obtained to be =
1 L

R L2 K JL

, 1 =

JL2 K

K JL

R L2 1 L

(4)

The at output y is given by any scalar multiple of the linear combination JL y = 0 1 1 x = w (5) K The system dened is indeed at with w as at output: setting y = w , all the system variables can be expressed as functions of y and derivatives up to second order: w = y 1 I = (J y + Kv y +Cr ) K U =L dI + RI + Ky dt (6)

U=

RJ + LKv JL K 2 + RKv y+ y+ y K K K R L + Cr + Cr K K

The differential parameterization derived from the atness property, also characterizes many system properties such as zero state detectability or zero state observability, zero dynamics. Fliess and coworkers have introduced the notion of an endogenous feedback which is essentially a dynamic feedback and they have shown that feedback linearisability via endogenous feedback is equivalent to differential atness.

Model predictive control [12]is formulated as the repeated solution of a (nite) horizon open-loop optimal control problem subject to system dynamics and input and state constraints. Figure 2 depicts the basic principle of model predictive control. Based on measurements obtained at time t, the controller predicts the dynamic behavior of the system over a prediction horizon Tp in the future and determines (over a control horizon Tc Tp ) the input such that a predetermined open-loop performance objective is minimized. If there were no disturbances and no model-plant mismatch, and if the optimization problem could be solved over an innite horizon, then the input signal found at t = 0 could be applied openloop to the system for all t 0. However, due to disturbances and model-plant mismatch the actual system behavior is different from the predicted one. To incorporate feedback, the optimal open-loop input is implemented only until the next sampling

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instant. The sampling time between the new optimization can vary in principle. Typically, it is, however, xed, i.e., the optimal control problem is re-evaluated after the sampling time, . Using the new system state at time t + , the whole procedureprediction and optimization is repeated, moving the control and prediction horizon forward. In Fig.2 the open-loop optimal input is depicted as arbitrary function of time. To allow a numerical solutions of the openloop optimal control problem the input is usually parameterized by a nite number of basis functions, leading to a nite dimensional optimization problem. In practice often a piecewise constant input is used, leading to Tc / decisions for the input over the control horizon.

U = (L

d I + Kw + RI ) dt

(11)

One can easily verify that the trajectory t w (t) is non decreasing, and thus that w (t) w f for all t t f which proves that this reference trajectory has no overshoot. Furthermore,it can be observed from g(3) that the maximum current on this trajectory is 0.27 A, and that the maximum voltage is 3 V.The main advantage of the atnessbased reference trajectory design is here that the reference of w is such that the motor can track it without saturating the constraints, and that the evolution of the voltage reference U is at each time compatible with the speed reference w .The preceding notion will be used to obtain so called open loop controls, that is control laws which will ensure the tracking of the reference at outputs when the model is assumed to be perfect and the state initial conditions are assumed to be exactly known. Since this is never the case in practice, one needs some better schemes that will ensure asymptotic convergence to zero of the tracking errors.

B. Tracking using MPC The predictive control approach consists in the data of a horizon T, a receding horizon T0 , generally small compared to T, some nal conditions as in the motion planning problem, the main difference being that the perturbations that may deviate the trajectory are taken into account precisely through the deviation with respect to the reference trajectory. To attenuate this deviation after a duration T0 , the system state is measured and a new trajectory relating these new initial conditions to the nal ones is computed, and so on. More precisely, given the initial conditions (xi , ui ), a reference trajectory relating them to the target (x f , u f ) at time t f = ti + T is computed.Then, at time ti + T0 , a measurement of (x(ti + T0 ), u(ti + T0 )) is done and, if this new point is not close enough to the reference trajectory, a new trajectory starting from (x(ti + T0 ), u(ti + T0 )) and arriving at (x f , u f ) at time ti + T0 + T 2 , is recomputed. This approach is iterated until we arrive close enough to the target.This method is however very popular in the industry.In practice, it gives satisfactory results for systems that are sufciently stable in open-loop, or unstable with slow enough dynamics compared to the receding horizon T0 , or with small enough perturbations and a precise enough model.

Fig(2):Principle of model predictive control The determination of the applied input based on the predicted system behavior allows the direct inclusion of constraints on states and inputs as well as the minimization of a desired cost function. However, since often a nite prediction horizon is chosen and thus the predicted system behavior will in general differ from the closed-loop one, precaution must be taken to achieve closed-loop stability and reasonable closed-loop performance. IV. PROPOSED CONTROL STRATEGY A. Reference trajectory generation using atness This approach consists in generating smooth enough trajectory that the motor can effectively follow, deduced from the system atness. In other words, from a reference trajectory of the angular speed, which is actually a at output, one can deduce the open-loop voltage and current reference trajectories that generate, in the absence of perturbations and modelling errors. Since the initial and nal conditions are w(ti ) = 0, w(ti ) = 0 and w(t f ) =w f , w(t f ) = 0, one can construct an at least twice continuously differentiable reference trajectory w [5]of the angular speed w by polynomial interpolation: t ti t ti 2 w = w f ( ) (3 2( )) (9) T T We then deduce the reference current and voltage I and U by (9) and (6), assuming that the unknown resistive torque Cr vanishes: 1 d I = (J w + Kv w ) (10) K dt

V. S IMULATION RESULTS For the DC motor model represented by (1) and (2) a reference trajectory can be generated as give in (9)-(11). It can be seen that, the current and voltage trajectories are dependent on the speed trajectory for a given speed control requirement. For the case study the parameters given in appendix are used to form the machine model for which the reference trajectories are generated as shown in g (3).

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Fig(3):Reference trajectories Fig 4 shows the close tracking of reference trajectory using MPC. The curve shown by dotted lines is the reference trajectory while the solid line indicates the MPC tracking performance. It can be seen that without any initial transients, the MPC tracks the reference trajectory exactly. The closeness of tracking can be accurately adjusted by proper tuning of MPC using the weighting coefcients Q and R. The performance of controller as seen in the plot gure (4 and 5) can be further improved or modied as per requirements with the help of MPC tuning parameters i.e. Q and R in. The weight matrix Q expresses the importance of the close tracking of the reference for various states, while the weight matrix R can be used to dene the preferred control. In short, the overall controller performance such as aggressiveness, accuracy etc is tuned by the weighting coefcients Q and R.

Fig(5): Tracking of motor current The magnitude of elements value of Q and R does not matter as discussed in [13], but their mutual ratios/ relations does matter in deciding controller performance. VI. C ONCLUSION The paper has developed a novel scheme of combining atness and RHC principle for speed control of a separately excited dc motor. It is observed that the controller is very effective in tracking the speed reference generated using atness without overshoot which normally occurs with traditional techniques like PID.The major contribution of paper is in terms of application of atness concept for generating reference trajectories and RHC principle for tracking the desired speed reference for DC motor. The future work is proposed to extend this idea of atness+RHC scheme in dealing with a noisy operating environment which is always an important consideration for electric drives control. Noise can be introduced due to several reasons. Two main causes are motor-load parameter drift and quantization and resolution errors of the speed and/or position encoders. A high performance drive controller should be robust enough to maintain accurate tracking performance regardless of the noisy operating environment and it can also be applied to power system transient stability problem VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to acknowledge N.M Singh and Sushama Wagh for their discussion and constructive suggestions in improving quality of paper. VIII. A PPENDIX DC motor data Based on [5], is as given below. L = 3.6mH R = 1.71 K = 0.1Nm/s J = 6 105 Nms2 /rd Kv = 0.3 105 Nms2 /rd Cr = 540 106 Nm

Fig(4):Tracking of angular velocity Fig 5 shows the motor current tracking and just like angular velocity, it can be seen that current trajectory is closely followed by MPC .

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w f = 30rd/s R EFERENCES
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