Abstract and Applied Analysis
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 169519, 16 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/169519
Research Article

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

Alejandro Rincón,1 Fredy E. Hoyos,2 and Fabiola Angulo2

1Facultad de Ingeniería y Arquitectura, Universidad Católica de Manizales, Cr 23 No 60-63, Manizales 170002, Colombia
2Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y Computación, Facultad de Ingeniería y Arquitectura, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Manizales, Percepción y Control Inteligente, Bloque Q, Campus La Nubia, Manizales 170003, Colombia

Received 1 August 2012; Revised 20 December 2012; Accepted 28 December 2012

Academic Editor: Gani Stamov

Copyright © 2013 Alejandro Rincón et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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.