Experiment 1 Exercises & Catching-up Option for Experiment 2

Due: Hand your report to the instructor in Experiment 2 Laboratory which starts in the week of Nov 1. Credit will be given only upon attendance to Experiment 1 or Experiment 2. A DC motor rigidly attached to the cart drives the pinion on a rack, thereby giving motion to the cart. When cart is motionless, a 1 Volt step input is applied to the motor and the motion of the cart is measured in cm unit as shown in the figure. The figure represents a real-time measurement of an experiments performed in the lab. 1) If we know that the open loop transfer function between the input voltage and the output displacement of the cart is in the form of
K s ( s + 1)

Find the appropriate K and values that can give rise to the output measurement in the figure. This activity is called system identification.

x(t) Rack Cart

x(t) [cm]

Time [sec]

2) If the digital encoder attached to the rotor shaft of the motor has 2048 ticks and if the pinion radius is 1 cm, what is the resolution of the encoder? That is, how much of displacement one can read when the encoder detects two consecutive ticks?

3) Based on the knowledge of the open loop transfer function, we now wish to implement a PD controller to control the cart position. Different than the controller architecture we use in class, we will use the following controller architecture, where kp and kd respectively represent the proportional and derivative controller gains. In this control architecture, the desired cart position is provided as a square wave (with positive and negative values) with amplitude 20 cm and frequency 0.1 Hz. This square wave is then offset with a +20 cm constant in order to generate a desired displacement only in the positive direction of x(t). As shown in the figure, the control gains are configured differently in the closed loop scheme, where the derivative controller kd does not multiply an s term (representing the derivative operation), since the cart velocity (derivative of position) is fed to it. The negative sign implemented on the signal after kd is for adding damping into the system, as will be tested. For the proportional control, the cart position is measured and compared, and then the position error is penalized by kp.
Desired position Voltage input Cart velocity Cart position

kp kd

(a) Find the transfer function of the closed loop system between cart position and desired cart position. (b) Find the controller gains kp and kd such that the closed loop system exhibits a damping ratio of 0.9 and a settling time of 0.2 sec. Construct the control architecture presented in the figure in Simulink environment, and present your results for these controller gains. (c) Set kd = 0 at step (b) and compare the simulation results with those in step (b). 4) For the control system given above, can you find gains kp and kd such that the total voltage provided into the system never exceeds 3 Volts, and the square wave tracking is as desirable as possible (i.e. the error magnitude is minimal)?