Development and Tuning of a PID Control System for Mobile Robot Drive

Abstract

In the present study, a motor-drive test-bench is designed and fabricated using locally available hardware components. The test-bench contains a 12V DC motor which is connected to a flywheel to provide inertial load and also to a DC motor to act as a fixed load. The system is controlled by a control system capable of implementing ON-OFF, P, PI, PD and PID control actions. The controller is implemented using PIC18F4550 microcontroller. The system also contains extensive sensor/instrumentation to measure the system response in response to the applied control action. Three different speed profiles are transmitted to the motor control system which generates the control action using the sensor readings. The motor control system is implemented using PIC18F452 microcontroller system. Control actions are implemented using Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signal sent by the motor control system. H-Bridge is used to control the direction of the motor and MOSFET is used as an electronic switch to provide PWM action. The system responses are analyzed and it is found that optimized PID controllers provide optimum system response.