2016 6th International Annual Engineering Seminar (InAES), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Model Reference Adaptive Control for DC Motor

Based on Simulink

Munadi, M. Amirullah Akbar Tomohide Naniwa, Yoshiaki Taniai

Department of Mechanical Engineering Department of Human and Artificial Intelligent Systems,
Diponegoro University University of Fukui
Tembalang, Semarang 50275, Indonesia 3-9-1 Bunkyo, Fukui 910-8507, Japan
munadi@undip.ac.id, amir240891@gmail.com naniwa@rbt.his.u-fukui.ac.jp, taniai@rbt.his.u-fukui.ac.jp

Abstract— Sometimes the conventional feedback control can not Control (MRAC) to control our DC motor model. It will be
work well to cope with the changes that vary in its dynamic system. designed in Simulink to simulate the control system.
The parameters of the dynamic system that changes with time lead This paper presents the application of an adaptive control of
to a conventional feedback control system is not able to maintain for a DC motor. The uncertainties include parametric variations
control. This is caused by circumstances which are nonlinear and in the time-varying disturbance. We chose to use MRAC with
receive many disturbance so that the transient response of the
system to be less precise and accurate to the desired steady state
the MIT rule method for the adaptation mechanism and estimate
conditions. To overcome these problems, this paper presents an controller parameter to match the reference model. The purpose
adaptive control system which can cope with the change of the of this paper is to obtain an adaptive control design that is
dynamic DC motor system. The adaptive control system used is resistant to disturbance by using Simulink for modeling the
Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) which contain four dynamics of the system so that it can easily obtain a solution of
part. They are reference model, adaptation mechanism, plant, and modeling without having too many calculations of the complex
control law. We designs DC motor plant by using Simscape in mathematical equations.
Simulink. An ideal response for reference model is designed by This paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the
modeling the dynamic DC motor. Design of an adaptation DC motor description which contains the modeling dynamic
mechanism with MIT rule and control law with Proportional
Integral Derivative (PID) controller are present. It can affect the
system and get the transfer function for DC motor speed.
response of adaptive control system and matching the desired Section III presents the design of the proposed MRAC. Section
ideal response from reference model even when the system receives IV presents the result of simulation, and the last section presents
a disturbance. the conclusions based on the purpose of the paper with future
work suggestion.
Keywords- DC motor; MIT rule; MRAC; PID controller
II. DC MOTOR DESCRIPTION
A DC motor directly provides rotary motion and coupled
I. INTRODUCTION with wheels or drums and cables, it can provide translational
A DC motor is the most widely applied actuator in the motion. The electric equivalent circuit of the armature and the
industry, especially for robotic actuators such as in the control free-body diagram of the rotor are shown in Fig. 1.
position of an arm robot manipulator [1,2]. DC motors in the
industry have a high performance and receive a lot of
disturbances caused by the working environment of
uncertainty. Some researchers studied the nonlinear condition
of DC motors as in [3,4]. With these conditions, simple controls
are not strong enough to handle them so that it takes a control
method that can make a DC motor adapt to the environmental
conditions while maintaining the performance of the system
without having to re-set parameters. To improve its
performance, the DC motor has to be optimized in the control
system. A nonliniear control system approach for a DC motor
such as a sliding mode control design as in [5], backstepping
Fig.1. Schematic representation of a DC motor system [2].
control as in [6,7], and an adaptive control as in [8-13] have
been discussed. Based on paper as in [5-13], the adaptive
control approach is the most suitable type of control to treat
conditions such as the disturbance of a DC motor. So, we used
the adaptive control based on Model Reference Adaptive

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 2016 6th International Annual Engineering Seminar (InAES), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

The value of the DC motor parameters to be used in this

simulation are shown in Table 1.

TABLE I. DC MOTOR PARAMETER AND VALUE [2].

Parameter Value

Momen of inertia Jm = 0,000052 Kg.m2

Friction coefficient Bm = 0,01 N.ms Fig. 3. Simscape model of DC motor.
Back EMF constant Kb = 0,235 V/rad s-1
Torque constant Ka = 0,235 Nm/A
Electric resistance Ra = 2 ohm III. DESIGN OF PROPOSED MRAC
Electric inductance La = 0.23 H Generally, a model-reference adaptive control system can be
Input voltage va schematically represented by Fig. 4. It is composed of four parts:
Back EMF voltage vb a plant containing unknown parameters, a reference model for
Armature Current ia compactly specifying the desired output of the control system, a
Developed Torque τm
feedback control law containing adjustable parameters, and an
Angle of motor shaft θ
Load Torque TL
adaptation mechanism for updating the adjustable parameters.
The output of the system is compared to a desired response from
a reference model. The control parameters are updated based on
Based on Fig. 1, we can derive the following governing
this error. The goal is for the parameters to converge to ideal
differential equations based on Newton's 2nd law as in (1) and values that cause the plant response to match the response of the
Kirchhoff's voltage law as in (2) that represent the state of the reference model [14].
dynamics of the DC motor system, so the equation as follows.

= ( )− (1)

= ( ) − ( )− ( ) (2)

Furthermore, to obtain a transfer function, the equations in

(1) and (2) were changed to the frequency domain using the
Laplace transform in order to obtain the transfer function in (3). Fig. 4. Block diagram of model-reference adaptive system [15].
Including the parameters in Table 1, we can get the transfer
function of a DC motor for controlling speed. There are several methods which are used in the adaptation
mechanism such as the MIT rule, Lyapunov theory, passivity
( ) theory etc [8]. Here the MIT rule adaptation mechanism is used
= )( )
(3) to tune the controller parameter [14,15] that is represented by
( ) [( ]
Fig. 5.
The transfer function in (3) presents that the rotational
speed, is considered the output and the armature voltage is
considered the input, Va Then we converted into a block
diagram as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig.2. Block diagram of DC motor.

Fig. 5. Simulink block diagram of MRAC based on MIT rule.
Fig. 2 is converted into a Simscape form in Simulink to obtain
Fig. 3 that represents actual DC motors.
A. Reference Model
A reference model is used to specify the ideal response of
the adaptive control system to the external command.
Intuitively, it provides the ideal plant response which the
adaptation mechanism should seek in adjusting the parameters.
A reference model can be obtained by performing linearization

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 2016 6th International Annual Engineering Seminar (InAES), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

to the plant model by entering the parameters in Table 1 then The first-order model in (5) is to be controlled by tuning the
obtaining the transfer function in (4) which describes the PID to get the desired response as a reference model. Fig. 8 is
response of the DC motor speed [14,15]. the result of tuning the PID with Table 2 and describes the value
of the PID gain and the desired response system.
( )
( )
= (4)
( . )( . )

We then get the unit step open-loop response plot in Fig. 6 for
the system in (4).

Fig.8. Tuning PID response for closely first-order system.

TABLE 2 . VALUE OF PID GAIN AND THE DESIRED RESPONSE SYSTEM OF

REFERENCE MODEL.
Fig. 6. Step response for open-loop system. Parameters Tuned
P 0.10997
Based on Fig. 6, and the roots of the characteristic equation I 5.837
Controller
in (4), the system has a stable condition. Furthermore, to D 0
N 100
prevent the effects of the higher order frequency and have a Rise time 0.11 seconds
good response, we consider closely a first-order model which Performance Settling time 0.181 seconds
approximates the original motor model. Fig. 7, presents how the Overshoot 0%
first-order model is close to the original response.
Finally, we get the linearization of the PID closed loop control
for the first-order model. It is described as a transfer function in
(6).

( ) . .
( )
= (6)
. .

B. Plant
The plant is assumed to have a known structure. We
modeled the DC motor plant by using simscape in Fig. 9. It
describes the actual DC motor without modeling the
mathematic equation.

Fig.7. first-order approximation to the motor model.

By calculating the time constant and the amplitude in Fig 6, we

then get the transfer function in (5) for first-order model.

( ) .
( )
= (5)
.
Fig.9. Simscape model for DC motor.

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 2016 6th International Annual Engineering Seminar (InAES), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

C. Adaptation Mechanism = (10)

The adaptation mechanism is used to adjust the parameters
in the control law. In MRAC systems, the adaptation law
searches for parameters such that the response of the plant under = (11)
adaptive control becomes the same as that of the reference
model. The objective of the adaptation is to make the tracking
Based on Fig. 10, we can generate the error in (12) which is p
error converge to zero [14]. We used the MIT rule to adapt the
controller [15].
= d/dt as the differetial operator and arrive at the sensitivity
derivative in (13).
The MRAC begins by defining the tracking error (e) in (7).
As shown in Fig. 5. Yp is the plant output and Ym is the reference
model output: = − = ( ) − ( ) (12)

e = Yp - Y m (7) = ( ) = (13)

To present the MIT rule, we will consider a closed-loop

Based on the equation that were described in (9) and (13), we
system in which the controller has one adjustable parameter
can obtain the MIT rule for adaptation law in (14).
theta (θ). (8) presents equation of the error cost function of theta
with J is given as a function of theta.
= −γ′ = − γ (14)
( )= (8)
D. Controller
The goal is to minimize to zero. For this reason, the change in
The controller that is described in Fig. 11 is usually
the parameter theta in the direction of the negative gradient of
parameterized by a number of adjustable parameters. The
J. So the equation becomes (9) with γ is an adaptation gain.
controller should have a perfect tracking capacity in order to
allow the possibility of tracking convergence. For this
= −γ = − γ (9) simulation, we use the PID controller to set the response system
of the plant and get the PID gain. Fig. 12 and Table 3 show the
We will now use the MIT rule to obtain a method for undesirable design of the plant with a high overshoot. The
adjusting the parameter theta as shown in Fig. 10. Consider the purpose of the design is a differentiator between the plant
problem, Fig. 6, presents adjusting a feed-forward gain. In this design with the design of the reference model so the adaptation
problem, it is assumed that the process is a liniear plant which process towards a zero error value with changes in theta will be
is built by the model Simscape, G(s), the reference model, seen clearly.
Gm(s) and the control law, u.

Fig. 11. Control law with PID controller.

By using tuning the PID block in Fig. 11, we can get the
values of the gain with a response like those shown in Table 2
and Fig. 8.
Fig. 10. Block diagram of MRAC for adjustment of a feedforward gain
based on the MIT rule.

Control law u, described in (10) is composed of a control

signal uc , and theta θ, described in (11). We use the PID control
to generate a control signal. The type of method used to obtain
the PID control gain is to use the PID tuning block in Simulink.

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 2016 6th International Annual Engineering Seminar (InAES), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Fig.12. Tuning PID response for plant.

Fig. 13. Square signal as input to MRAC.
TABLE 3 . VALUE OF PID GAIN AND THE UNDESIRED RESPONSE SYSTEM OF
PLANT.
Parameters Tuned
P 0.39442
I 24.7002
Controller
D -0.0018871
N 209.0118
Rise time 0.0237 seconds
Performance Settling time 0.0901 seconds
Overshoot 7.54 %

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

This section demonstrates the simulation result of the DC
motor speed control. Before starting the simulation, we entered
the parameter values from Table 1 into the workspace
MATLAB which was used as input in the modeling of the
MRAC on Simulink. These are some of the results that will be
discussed in this paper. One is the relationship between the Fig. 14. Square error signal which is minimized to zero.
gamma value of the speed of adaptation, which is seen from the
errors and generated theta.
The pulse generator in Simulink produces some square
signals which are used as input to the MRAC system as shown
in Fig. 13. The signal (Yp) that is produced from the plant has
been successfully matched to the reference signal (Ym). It is
described by the error signal in Fig. 13 towards zero and the
constant signal of theta as shown in Fig. 14. Furthermore, the
changes of square theta signal which is produced by adaptation
mechanism are shown in Fig. 15. Another result is that when
given a disturbance torque (TL) on the system as shown in Fig.
16 the plant signal also has been asymptotically stable to the
reference signal. It is described by the error signal in Fig. 17
that goes to zero and the constant signal of theta as shown in
Fig. 18.

Fig. 15. The changes of square theta signal which is produced by adaptation
mechanism.

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 2016 6th International Annual Engineering Seminar (InAES), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

V. CONCLUSION
The simulation results showed that the MIT rule has been
able to make the adaptive control system stable and resistant to
varying disturbance. Increasing the value of gamma causes the
system to adapt more quickly, but if the gamma value is too
large, the system is very sensitive and unstable. For future work,
it will be valuable to implement the MRAC design into
hardware.

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Fig. 18. The changes of disturbance theta signal which is produced by

adaptation mechanism.

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