Controller Design for a Second-Order Plant with Uncertain Parameters and Disturbance: Application to a DC Motor

Abstract

This paper shows the controller design for a second-order plant with unknown varying behavior in the parameters and in the disturbance. The state adaptive backstepping technique is used as control framework, but important modifications are introduced. The controller design achieves mainly the following two benefits: upper or lower bounds of the time-varying parameters of the model are not required, and the formulation of the control and update laws and stability analysis are simpler than closely related works that use the Nussbaum gain method. The controller has been developed and tested for a DC motor speed control and it has been implemented in a Rapid Control Prototyping system based on Digital Signal Processing for dSPACE platform. The motor speed converges to a predefined desired output signal.