Servo/pendulum motor control system

The Servo Pendulum system is part of the Matrix Process Control range of products.

This unique system allows students to understand the control of motors in two respects: to control the speed of a motor – a servo control system - and to control the position of a motor’s rotor – an inverting pendulum. One piece of equipment covers both problems.

The system consists of a powerful DC motor mounted on a rugged frame. A disc with captive nuts is attached to the DC motor and students can screw in 100-gram weights to different parts of the disc to alter the system's characteristics. A single weight at 0 degrees forms an inverting pendulum.

The system includes full control and data-logging hardware, which is USB, Bluetooth, LAN/Wi-fi compatible. Three software applications allow students to understand Manual control, On/Off control and PID control. The applications allow all parameters to be set, show a graphical representation of the performance of the system and allow data to be logged to a file for further analysis.

The system is shipped with a full API making it compatible with MATLAB or LabVIEW.

A full suite of worksheets, teacher’s notes and reference documentation is supplied.

Learning objectives

• Servo control systems
• Inverting pendulums
• Drive systems and their scaling factors
• Sensor characteristics, scaling factors, calibration
• On/off control systems, oscillation, hysteresis
• System time constants
• P control systems and offset error
• PI control systems
• PID control systems
• Control functions and block diagrams
• Pseudocode implementations of P, PI and PID systems
• Recognition of problems in PID systems
• Integral wind-up issues and overcoming them
• Derivative filtering
• Ziegler Nichols algorithm
• Manual tuning of PID systems

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