LECTURE

INSTRUMENTATION AND COTROL

PID CONTROLLER
By Tim Wescott
FLIR Systems
OBJECTIVE

This presentation material will show how to implement and tune a

simple controller without getting into heavy mathematics and
control theory.
PID control
The PID controller has been in use for over a century in various
forms. It has enjoyed popularity as a purely mechanical device,
as a pneumatic device, and as an electronic device.

The digital PID controller using a microprocessor has recently

come into its own in industry.

PID stands for “proportional, integral, derivative.” These three

terms describe the basic elements of a PID controller.

Each of these elements performs a different task and has a

different effect on the functioning of a system.

In a typical PID controller these elements are driven by a

combination of the system command and the feedback signal
from the object that is being controlled (usually referred to as the
“plant”). Their outputs are added together to form the system
output.
Figure 1 shows a block diagram of a basic PID controller.

In this case the derivative element is being driven only from plant
feedback. The plant feedback is subtracted from the command
signal to generate an error.

This error signal drives the proportional and integral elements. The
resulting signals are added together and used to drive the plant
 Sample Plant Application of PID Controller
Motor Driving A Gear Train
Sample Applications :
 Printer carriage driver
 Automobile throttle
mechanism in cruise control
system
 Other moderately precise
position
controller

The motor is driven by a voltage that is commanded by software. The motor output
is geared down to drive the actual mechanism. The position of this final drive is
measured by the potentiometer.
A DC motor driven by a voltage wants to go at a constant speed that is proportional
to the applied voltage. Usually the motor armature has some resistance that limits
its ability to accelerate, so the motor will have some delay between the change in
input voltage and the resulting change in speed. The gear train takes the movement
of the motor and multiplies it by a constant. Finally, the potentiometer measures the
position of the output shaft.
Figure 3 shows the step response of the motor and gear combination.

The step response

of a system is just
the behaviour of
the output in
response to an
input that goes
from zero to some
constant value at
time t = 0.
The response of
the motor starts
out slowly due to
the time constant,
but once that is out
of the way the
motor position
ramps at a
constant velocity.
Precision Actuator

It is sometimes necessary to control the position of something very

precisely. A precise positioning system can be built using a freely
moving mechanical stage, a speaker coil (a coil and magnet
arrangement), and a non-contact position transducer.

Sample Applications:
 stabilising an element of an optical system
 locating some other piece of equipment or sensor.
Software commands the
current in the coil. This
current sets up a magnetic
field that exerts a force on
the magnet. The magnet is
attached to the stage, which
moves with an acceleration
proportional to the coil
current.

Finally, the stage position is

monitored by a noncontact
position transducer

The equations of motion for this system are fairly simple. The on the stage is
proportional to the drive command alone, so the acceleration of the system is
exactly proportional to the drive

The step response of this system by itself is a parabola, as shown

in Figure 5.
Temperature Control
Figure 6 shows a diagram
of an example system. The
vessel is heated by an electric
heater, and the temperature of
its contents is sensed by a
temperature- sensing device.
Figure 7 shows the step
response of the system to a
change in Vd.. The response
tends to settle out to a constant
temperature for a given drive,
but it can take a great deal of
time doing it.
Without lots of insulation,
thermal systems tend to be very
sensitive to outside effects. This
effect is not shown in the figure,
but it be investigated it later
Controllers
The elements of a PID controller presented here either take their
input from the measured plant output or from the error signal, which
is the difference between the plant output and the system
command.
Control Code
- code use in the controller programming, uses
 floating point
 integer
 fixed-point arithmetic.
Sample Function call
Proportional
Proportional control is the easiest feedback control to implement,
and simple proportional control is probably the most common kind
of control loop.

A proportional controller is just the error signal multiplied by a

constant and fed out to the drive. The proportional term gets
calculated with the control code

Sample Control Code to Calculate the Proportional Term

Figure 8 shows what happens
when you add proportional
feedback to the motor and gear
system.
For small gains (kp = 1) the motor
goes to the correct target, but it
does so quite slowly.
Increasing the gain (kp = 2) speeds
up the response to a point.
Beyond that point (kp = 5, kp = 10)
the motor starts out faster, but it
overshoots the target.

In the end the system doesn’t settle out any quicker than it would have with
lower gain, but there is more overshoot. If we kept increasing the gain we would
eventually reach a point where the system just oscillated around the target
and never settled out-the system would be unstable.
The motor and gear start to overshoot with high gains because of the delay in
the motor response. If you look back at Figure 2, you can see that the motor
position doesn’t start ramping up immediately. This delay, plus high feedback
gain, is what causes the overshoot seen in Figure 8.
Figure 9 shows the response of
the precision actuator with
proportional feedback only.

Proportional control alone

obviously doesn’t help this
system.

There is so much delay in

the plant that no matter how
low the gain is, the system will
oscillate.

As the gain is increased, the

frequency of the output will
increase but the system just
won’t settle
Figure 10 shows what happens
when you use pure proportional
feedback with the temperature
controller.
This shows the system response
with a disturbance due to a
change in ambient temperature at
t = 2s.
Even without the disturbance you
can see that proportional control
doesn’t get the temperature to
the desired setting.
Increasing the gain helps, but
even with kp = 10 the output is
still below target, and you are
starting to see a strong overshoot
that continues to travel back and
forth (this iscalled ringing).
As the previous examples show, a proportional controller alone can
be useful for some things, but it doesn’t always help.

Plants that have too much delay, like the precision actuator, can’t
be stabilised with proportional control.

Some plants, like the temperature controller, cannot be brought to

the desired set point.

Plants like the motor and gear combination may work, but they
may need to be driven faster than is possible with proportional
control alone.

To solve these control problems you need to add integral

or differential control or both.
Integral
Integral control is used to add long
term precision to a control loop. It is
almost always used in conjunction
with proportional control

Sample code to implement an

integrator is shown.

The integrator state, iState is the sum

of all the preceding inputs.

The parameters iMin and iMax are the

minimum and maximum allowable
integrator state values.
Integral control by itself usually
decreases stability, or destroys
it altogether.

Figure 11 shows the motor and

gear with pure integral control
(pGain =0).

The system doesn’t settle. Like

the precision actuator with
proportional control, the motor
and gear system with integral
control alone will oscillate with
bigger and bigger swings until
something hits a limit.
(Hopefully the limit isn’t
breakable.)
Figure 12 shows the temperature
control system with pure integral
control.
This system takes a lot longer to
settle out than the same plant with
proportional control (see Figure
10), but notice that when it does
settle out, it settles out to the
target value-even with the
disturbance added in.
If your problem at hand
doesn’t require fast settling, this
might be a workable system.
Figure 12 shows why we use an integral term. The integrator state
“remembers” all that has gone on before, which is what allows the controller to
cancel out any long term errors in the output. This same memory also
contributes to instability-the controller is always responding too late, after the
plant has gotten up speed.
To stabilise the two previous systems, you need a little bit of their present
value, which you get from a proportional term.
Figure 13 shows the motor and gear with proportional and integral (PI)
control.
Compare this with Figures 8 and 11. The position takes longer to settle
out than the system with pure proportional control, but it will not settle to the
wrong spot.
Figure 14 shows what happens when you use PI control on the heater system.
The heater still settles out to the exact target temperature, as with pure integral
control (see Figure 12), but with PI control, it settles out two to three times
faster.
This figure shows operation pretty close to the limit of the speed attainable
using PI control with this plant.
Pointers
1. Since you are adding up the error over time, the sampling time that you are
running becomes important.

2. You need to pay attention to the range of your integrator to avoid windup.

The rate that the integrator state changes is equal to the average error
multiplied by the integrator gain multiplied by the sampling rate.

Because the integrator tends to smooth things out over the long term you can
get away with a somewhat uneven sampling rate, but it needs to average
out to a constant value.

At worst, your sampling rate should vary by no more than ý20% over any 10-
sample interval.
Figure 15 illustrates the effect
of integrator windup using the
motor/controller of Figure 13, and
limited the motor drive to ý0.2.

Not only is controller output much

greater than the drive available to
the motor, but the motor shows
severe overshoot.

The motor actually reaches its

target at around five seconds, but
it doesn’t reverse direction until
eight seconds, and doesn’t settle
out until 15 seconds have gone by
The easiest and most direct
way to deal with integrator windup
is to limit the integrator state,

Figure 16 shows what

happens when you take the
system in Figure 15 and limit
the integrator term to the available
drive output.

The controller output is still large

(because of the proportional term),
but the integrator doesn’t wind up
very far and the system starts
settling out at five seconds, and
finishesat around six seconds.
Differential

In general, if you can’t stabilise a plant with proportional control, you can’t
stabilise it with PI control. We know that proportional control deals with the
present behaviour of the plant, and that integral control deals with the past
behaviour of the plant.

If we had some element that predicts the plant behaviour then this might be
used to stabilise the plant. A differentiator can do this.

The code below shows the differential term of a PID controller.

Using the actual plant position rather than them error makes form smoother
transitions when the command value changes.
The differential term itself is the last value of the position minus the current value
of the position. This gives you a rough estimate of the velocity (delta position /
sample time), which predicts where the position will be in a while.
With differential control you can stabilise the precision actuator system.

Figure 17 shows the response of

the precision actuator system
with proportional and derivative
(PD) control.
This system settles in less than
1/2 of a second, compared to
multiple seconds for the other
systems.
Figure 18 shows the heating system with PID control. You can see the
performance improvement to be had by using full PID control with this plant.
Differential control is very powerful, but it is also the most problematic of the
control types presented here.
The three problems most likely to occur are:
 sampling irregularities,
 noise,
 high frequency oscillations.
Differential control suffers from noise problems because noise is usually
spread relatively evenly across the frequency spectrum.
Control commands and plant outputs, however, usually have most of their
content at lower frequencies.
Proportional control passes noise through unmolested.
Integral control averages its input signal, which tends to kill noise.
Differential control enhances high frequency signals, so it enhances noise.
You can low-pass filter your differential output to reduce the noise, but this
can severely affect its usefulness.
Tuning
The nice thing about tuning a PID controller is that you don’t need to have a
good understanding of formal control theory to do a fairly good job of it.
About 90% of the closed-loop controller applications in the world do very
well indeed with a controller that is only tuned fairly well.
Once you get the setup ready, set all gains to zero. If you suspect that you will
not need differential control (like the motor and gear example or the
thermal system) then skip down to the section that discusses tuning the
proportional gain. Otherwise start by adjusting your differential gain.
You cannot use differential control alone the way the controller is coded .
Set your proportional gain to some small value (one or less). Check to see how
the system works.
If it oscillates with proportional gain you should be able to cure it with differential
gain. Start with about 100 times more differential gain than proportional gain.
Watch your drive signal. Now start increasing the differential gain until you
see oscillation, excessive noise, or excessive (more than 50%) overshoot on the
drive or plant output. Note that the oscillation from too much differential gain is
much faster than the oscillation from not enough.
Other Issues
Unless you are working on a project with very critical performance parameters
you can often get by with control gains that are within a factor of two of the
“correct” value.
This means that you can do all your “multiplies” with shifts. This can be very
handy when you’re working with a slow processor.
Sampling rate
If your sampling rate is too low you may not be able to achieve the performance
you want, because of the added delay of the sampling.
If your sampling rate is too high you will create problems with noise in your
differentiator and overflow in your integrator.
The rule of thumb for digital control systems is that the sample time should be
between 1/10th and 1/100th of the desired system settling time.
System settling time is the amount of time from the moment the drive comes out
of saturation until the control system has effectively settled out.
If you look at Figure 16, the
controller comes out of saturation
at about 5.2s, and has settled out
at around 6.2s.
If you can live with the one
second settling time you
could get away with a sampling
rate as low as 10Hz
You should treat the sampling
rate as a flexible quantity.
Anything that might make the
control problem more difficult
would indicate that you should
raise the sampling rate. Exert control
This covers the basics of implementing
Factors such as having a difficult
and tuning PID controllers.
plant to control, or needing
With this information, you
differential control, or needing
very precise control would all should be able to attack the next
indicate raising the sampling control problem that comes your
rate. way and get it under control.