ENB313

2015se2

Cholette

ENB313: Automatic Control

Computer Lab 7: Design of DC Motor Controller and The Root

Locus
Why do I care? / Introduction
First up this week is the design of a controller for the DC motor you identified in Computer
Lab 5. Well design some simple controllers for this system which youll deploy in the DC
motor experiment in Weeks 11 and 12 (and write-up for 5% of your grade in Week 13).
The second task this week to explore the use of how gain adjustment affects the locations of
the poles in the -plane. These plots, called root loci, are valuable tools in control design.
Once again, there is no demo. You all have all the MATLAB you need at this point!

Exercise 1*: DC Motor Controller Design

Recall our DC motor transfer function from

()
=
() + 1

(1)

whose parameters you found in Computer Lab 5. Consider the control structure in Figure 1.
Your job is now to design a feedback controller, (), that will achieve good steady-state
tracking and acceptable transients. To this end, do the following:

a) Assume initially that your controller is a proportional controller, i.e. () = . Find

the conditions on that produce a stable system a steady-state tracking error of
less than 0.1 to a unit step.
b) You now complicate your controller a bit by adding an integrator, i.e.
() = +

find the conditions on and that produce a stable system and a steady-state
error less than 0.1.
c) Now, find values of and that result in less than 10% overshoot to a step and
yield a settling time thats less than 0.5s. You may ignore any zeros for this step.
d) Simulate the closed-loop system in c) and twiddle the parameters a bit to achieve
the 10% overshoot and required settling time.
e) Finally, simulate the closed-loop step response for both controllers (a and d) and plot
in the same figure. Record your final gains somewhere safe for Weeks 11 and 12!
Steps a) c) are most easily done by hand.

ENB313

2015se2

Cholette

Figure 1: DC motor control structure for Exercise 1

Exercise 2*: Proportional feedback and the -plane (Root Locus

Preview)
Consider the system

() =

+3
( + 1)( + 5)( + 8)

which is placed in a unity feedback configuration seen in Figure 2. Do the following:

a) Plot an x at the open-loop poles and a o at the open-loop zeros.
b) Compute the closed-loop zeros and poles at each gain value. This can either be done
by hand or using MATLAB. On the same figure as part a), plot the closed-loop pole
locations from b).
c) Using this plot, can you find a value of that causes the system to go unstable ?
d) Do the zeros vary with ?

Figure 2: Unity feedback configuration for Exercise 2

K
0
0.1
1
2
3
3.56
5
10
15
50
100
200
300

Closed-loop
Zeros

Closed-loop Poles

Table 1: values table for Exercise 3.