Teaching State-Space Control Methods Using a Floatshield Laboratory Plant

This paper presents state-space controller design and experimental results for recently developed open source Floatshield model, [7], [8]. The focus is on the dynamic compensator design, which includes state-feedback and observer. Modeling, control design, simulation and real experiment steps are treated systematically, and several details not reported in the references are pointed out. Closed-loop identification is considered to estimate system parameters and then PI state-controller is designed in continuous or discrete-time domain using linear-quadratic (LQ) and pole-placement approaches. The results are verified by simulations and experiments on the real plant. The authors believe to contribute to educational potential of Floatshield for teaching state-space control methods, the tight connection between control theory and real world is shown in relatively simple way.