Controller design for a level control system with valve stiction: A data-driven approach

We propose a simple controller design method for a level control system subject to valve stiction. The proposed method is based on fictitious reference iterative tuning (FRIT) technique which can be adopted to tune parameters of simple controllers such as PID controllers by using a one-shot experimental data. In our framework, a simple model of the valve stiction is constructed using a piecewise-linear function, whose inverse model is easily obtained and used as a stiction compensator. The proposed method is applied to a double-tank liquid level system with several types of PID controllers. Numerical simulation is performed to verify effectiveness of the proposed approach.