Design of a low-cost worm-gear system as teaching tool for controller design

Abstract

In this thesis, we designed and developed a teaching tool based on a worm gear system and a general controller test environment. The experimental apparatus consists of three parts: an armature controlled DC motor with a tachometer, a worm gear set connected with a potentiometer and a set of removable loads. Four controllers, the PID controller, LQR controller, H[] controller and fuzzy logic controller are designed, simulated and implemented. These controllers are designed in the continuous time domain. Simulations are done to test and evaluate the performances of these controllers. A PI controller turns out to be the best one. The purpose of our controller test environment is to test and evaluate a controller with hardware in the loop before the controller is implemented on special hardware. The program package can test the control algorithm and record the real time data in a file automatically. These data can be analyzed by Matlab. We implemented and tested these designed controller by the developed controller test environment. It confirms our simulation results and further clarifies the strength and weakness of each controller.