PI Tracking Control of a Single Link Manipulator

In this paper, the tracking control design by using the Linear Algebra Based (LAB) methodology is applied to derive the PID control of a flexible single link manipulator. As an interesting feature in this methodology, the control design requirements are determined by the treatment of the control error in approaching the reference trajectory allowing the use of any error-based controller to compute the control action. Thus, the tuning facilities of the PID control are exploited and a PID-LAB controller is designed. In order to validate the control design a simulated manipulator developed by using Matlab/Simulink has been used. By Simscape Multibody, the different components of the manipulator can be simulated, having access to the full state. Excellent results are reported and the experimental PID parameters tuning procedure illustrates the facilities provided in the design stage.