LabView Based Experimental Validation of Fractional Order Motion Controllers

Yongshun Jin , Ying Luo, Chunyang Wang and YangQuan Chen

Abstract Fractional calculus has been more and more frequently used in the control domain in recent years. But the fractional order controllers are not widely implemented on the real-time experiments because of the complexity of realization. In this paper, for the rst time on the LabVIEW hardwarein-the-loop platform which is a fast prototyping experimental setup, we made an experimental study of the fractional order proportional derivative (FO-PD) and [proportional derivative] (FO-[PD]) controllers which are designed following systematic schemes. The experimental results validated the advantages of the FO-PD and FO-[PD] controllers over the traditional integer order PID controllers designed under the same design specications. Furthermore, the future work of the cooperative motion control system with multi-LabVIEW platforms for fractional order control is introduced briey. Index Terms LabVIEW; hardware-in-the-loop; Quanser; integer order PID; fractional order PD controller; fractional order [PD] controller; robustness.

I. I NTRODUCTION The application of fractional order controllers is becoming an active research topic in recent years [1][2][3]. The fractional order PID controller has been proposed in [1], where a better control performance was demonstrated in comparison with the classical PID controller. In [4], a method used to implement fractional order proportional derivative controller by frequency domain approximation with Oustaloup recursive algorithm was presented, and a systematic tuning rule of the fractional order proportional derivative controller was proposed in [5]. The fact that the controllers making use of the fractional order derivatives and integrals has the potential to achieve better performance has been realized. However, many of the fractional order controllers introduced before just were based on the theoretical analysis, and simulation illustrations. For further validation of advantages of using the fractional order controllers, the experimental studies based on realtime experimental platforms performing the fractional order controllers are necessary and meaningful. Nowadays, with the development of the computer technology, the traditional control system simulation cannot meet the requirement of the researchers, but many experiments based on hardware are lack of the exibility.
Email: jys2225455@hotmail.com; Yongshun Jin is currently a Ph.D. candidate on leave from Dept. of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, P R China. Center for SelfOrganizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS), Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA. Corresponding author. Email: ying.luo@ieee.org; Ying Luo is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Automation, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China. Email: wangchunyang19@cust.edu.cn; Chunyang Wang is a professor in the Dept. of Electronics and Information Engineering, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun, China. Email: yqchen@ece.usu.edu; Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322, USA. URL: http://fractionalcalculus.googlepages.com/.

Therefore, the LabVIEW hardware-in-the-loop experimental platform which is a fast prototyping experimental setup, reduces the cost and increases the exibility, attracts more and more researchers attention [6][7][8]. In this paper, for the rst time on the LabVIEW hardware-in-the-loop platform which is a fast prototyping experimental setup, we made an experimental study of the fractional order proportional derivative (FO-PD) and [proportional derivative] (FO-[PD]) controllers which are designed following systematic schemes. The experimental results validated the advantages of the FO-PD and FO-[PD] controllers over the traditional integer order PID controller designed under the same design specications. Furthermore, the future work of the cooperative motion control system with multi-LabVIEW platforms for fractional order control is introduced briey. The remaining part of this paper is organized as follows. In Sec. II, the experiment system based on LabVIEW will be introduced. In Sec. III and Sec. IV the design of fractional order controller and implementation of fractional order controller using LabVIEW will be presented. In Sec. V, conclusions are presented, and the future work that implement cooperative control system based on LabVIEW will be introduced briey. II. I NTRODUCTION TO THE L AB VIEW H ARDWARE - IN - THE - LOOP E XPERIMENTAL P LATFORM The LabVIEW hardware-in-the-loop experimental system consists of LabVIEW software system, LabVIEW terminal board for data acquisition (DAQ) with plug-in hardware, and peripheral Quanser equipments. The architecture of the experimental platform is shown in Fig. 1. A. LabVIEW Software System LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. The graphical language named G is a programming language that uses icons instead of lines of scripts to create applications. In contrast to script-based programming languages, where instructions determine program execution, LabVIEW uses dataow programming, and the programs are called virtual instruments (VIs), because their appearance and operation can imitate actual instruments, such as oscilloscopes, multimeters and so on. The VIs contains three components: the front panel, the block diagram and the icon/connector pane. The front panel serves as the user interface to control the parameters and indicate the unitstep response of the system. We need to manipulate the parameters and indicators to get the waveform of the unitstep response, so, we create the LabVIEW user interface in the front panel. Block diagram contains the graphical source
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code of the VI, and the front panel objects appear as terminals on the block diagram. The icon/connector panel is used to represent the VI in the block diagrams of other objects. In LabVIEW system, the control design and simulation module integrate system simulation and real-time implementation, which is a block diagram based environment for simulation of linear and nonlinear continuous-time and discrete-time dynamic systems. With the LabVIEW simulation module, we can investigate the time-dependent behavior of complex engineering system, model and simulate any system that differential and difference equation can characterize. Meanwhile, LabVIEW provides some toolkits to accomplish some complex algorithms. 1) LabVIEW Terminal Board for DAQ: The plug-in hardware for data acquisition (DAQ) as the LabVIEW terminal board was developed by National Instruments. The DAQ terminal board connects to the computer allowing the user to retrieve digitized data values. With the DAQ terminal board, the hardware only converts the incoming signal into a digital signal that is sent to the computer. Because there are many acquisition and analysis functions in LabVIEW, we can use virtual instrumentation to create a customized system for test, measurement, and industrial automation by combining different hardware and software components. 2) Peripheral Quanser Equipments: The peripheral Quanser equipments used in the LabVIEW hardware-inthe-loop consist of the Quanser NI E-series I/O terminal board, the Universal Power Module (UPM) and the Quanser SRV-02-ET motor. This terminal board is a general purpose data acquisition and control board which has 8 singleended analog inputs, 2 analog outputs, and 2 encoder inputs decoded in quadrature. The Quanser SRV-02-ET motor is a DC-motor, which provides an encoder for position feedback and a tachometer for velocity feedback.

The FO-PD controller has the following transfer function C2 (s) = Kp2 (1 + Kd2 s ) (3) where (0, 2). The FO-[PD] controller has the following transfer function (4) C3 (s) = Kp3 [1 + Kd3 s] where (0, 2). The open-loop transfer function G(s) is G(s) = C(s)P (s) (5)

where C(s) is the generalized form of the three controllers introduced above. For systematic design of these three controllers, for fair comparisons, the same specications are used here, (1) Phase margin specication: Arg[G(jc )] = Arg[C(jc )P (jc )] = + m . d(Arg(C(j)P (j))) )=c = 0. d (3) Gain crossover frequency specication: ( |G(j)| = |C(j)P (j)| = 1. (6)

(2) Robustness to variation in the DC gain of the system: (7)

(8)

For self-containing purpose, we list the controllers design equations in three appendices in the end of this paper. Detailed derivations are omitted due to space limitation. IV. E XPERIMENTAL VALIDATION ON L AB VIEW P LATFORM FOR THE FO-PD/FO-[PD] C ONTROLLERS The IO-PID, FO-PD and FO-[PD] controllers designed in Sec. III are validated and compared in the LabVIEW hardware-in-the-loop experimental platform introduced in Sec. II. Through simple system identication, the Quanser SRV02-ET DC motor velocity servo control system has been approximately modeled as a rst order transfer function as follows 1.58 . (9) Hs = 0.1s + 1 So, the position control system of Quanser SRV-02-ET DC 1.58 motor can be modeled as s(0.1s+1) , which has the same structure of the motion control system model in (1). We can see that the time constant T = 0.1s. The c and m are set as 10 (rad/s) and 70 , respectively. So we can calculate the parameters of the three controllers following the schemes introduced in Sec. III (see appendices). A. Implementation of IO-PID Controller Setting the parameters as T = 0.1s, c = 10(rad/s) and m = 70 , according to the discussing in Appendix I, we can get the parameter values of the IO-PID controller Kp1 = 12.8112, Ki1 = 0.7089 and Kd1 = 0.05384. For the implementation of the IO-PID controller, Fig. 2 is shown for the graph programme of the integer order control system. There are two loops in the graph. The upper one is a Simulation Loop, which include all simulation functions. The tasks of these functions are: 1) Compare the set point instructions with the feedback

Fig. 1.

The architecture of the LabVIEW experiment platform

III. S YSTEMATIC D ESIGN S CHEMES OF THE T HREE C ONTROLLERS The motion control system model considered in this paper 1 . (1) s(T s + 1) The transfer function of the traditional integer order PID controller is Ki1 C1 (s) = Kp1 (1 + + Kd1 s). (2) s P (s) = is

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signal; 2) Calculate and get the control instructions; 3) Output the instructions to drive the motor; 4) Read the input signal from the terminal board. These four tasks form a feed back control system. The Analog Output module and Analog Input module can be used to output instructions and receive the feedback signal, respectively in LabVIEW. In fact, it is convenient to implement the IO-PID controller in the Simulation Loop. Because the LabVIEW simulation environment is just like the MATLAB/Simulink, it provides the integral module, derivative module, proportional module and so on, which are useful for us to design the IO-PID controller. Therefore, we just need to make use of these modules and specify the parameters. Then we can establish an integer order controller as in Fig. 2. The other loop in Fig. 2 is a While Loop, which is a structure that repeats a section of code until a condition is met. At the bottom right corner of the loop, there is a control button to control the loop. In this loop, we can see a clock which is used to control the rate of i (Iteration Terminal). The front panel is shown in Fig. 3. We can see an oscilloscope in the panel, which displays the waveform. Under the oscilloscope, there are many knobs which are used to specify the parameters and congure the analogue output and analogue input. Actually, this front panel is an interactive user interface of a VI. Some VI in front panel gets instructions from a block diagram which is constructed in G, and the source code for the VI. In Fig. 3, we can obtain the step response performance using the IO-PID controller with response delay td1 = 0.32s, settling time ts1 = 3.8s and overshoot 1 % = 8%.

Fig. 3.

Step response using IO-PID controller

transfer function of the FO-PD controller. The Impulse Response Invariant Discretization (IRID) method introduced in [9] can be used to get the discretized transfer function. In fact, the key point of the IRID method is to approximately calculate the discrete-time nite dimensional z-transfer function of the continuous irrational transfer function s . If (0, 1), s is the fractional order differentiator; if (1, 0), s is the fractional order integrator. So, the discretized transfer function of FO-PD controller can be calculated (sampling time is 0.001s) C2 (z) = A2 (z) B2 (z) (10)

A2 (z) = 0.6667z 5 2.201z 4 + 2.733z 3 1.552z 2 + 0.3825z 0.02864 B2 (z) = 0.001128z 5 0.002496z 4 + 0.001737z 3 0.0003256z 2 4.717e 5z + 9.311e 6.

(11)

(12)

The VI in block diagram is shown in Fig. 4. From the front panel of the FO-PD in Fig. 5, we can see the step response performance of the FO-PD, response delay td2 = 0.315s, settling time ts2 = 0.64s and overshoot 2 % = 10%. C. Implementation of FO-[PD] Controller In [10], it is introduced that a discrete-time nite dimensional z transfer function is calculated to approximate a continuous-time fractional order low-pass lter whose trans1 fer function is [ s+1 ] where (0, 1). We can obtain the discrete-time transfer function of FO-[PD] controller as C3 (z) = A3 (z) B3 (z) (13)

Fig. 2.

The VI of IO-PID controller

B. Implementation of FO-PD Controller Setting the same design parameters as T = 0.1s, c = 10(rad/s) and m = 70 , according to the design in Appendix II, the parameters of the FO-PD controller can be calculated as = 0.9639, Kd2 = 0.05235 and Kp2 = 12.4675. For the implementation of the FO-PD in LabVIEW, we need to get the nite high-order approximated discretized

A3 (z) = 12.69z 5 40.46z 4 + 48.26z 3 26.15z 2 + 6.087z 0.4218 B3 (z) = 0.02352z 5 0.04989z 4 + 0.03269z 3 0.005101z 2 0.001223z + 0.000205.

(14)

(15)

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Fig. 4.

The VI of FO-PD/FO-[PD] controller

Fig. 6.

Step response using FO-[PD] controller

Fig. 7.

The comparison of the three controllers

Fig. 5.

Step response using FO-PD controller

controllers (20% variation from the desired value). In Fig. 8, we can see that, when the open-loop plant gain varies from 20% to 20%, the overshoot of step response using IO-PID controller varies 1%. However, using the FO-PD

We can establish a FO-[PD] controller according to the transfer function in the LabVIEW software system. The structure of FO-[PD] VI in block diagram is the same as that of FO-PD in Fig. 4. The step response using FO-[PD] controller is shown in Fig. 6. We can see the step response performance of FO-[PD], response delay td3 = 0.32s, settling time ts3 = 0.47s and overshoot 3 % = 0%. D. Comparison of the Three Controllers Figures. 3, 5 and 6 show the step responses using the three controllers designed following the proposed methods in this paper. The performance comparison of the three controllers is deliberately shown in Fig. 7. It can be seen that, 1) the settling time of IO-PID step response is the longest, and the settling time of FO-PD is longer than that of FO-[PD]; 2) the IO-PID and FO-PD step responses exhibit overshoots, but the FO-[PD] has no overshoot at all. So we can see the performance using FO-[PD] is the best among all three controllers. In order to validate the robustness of the three controllers, we changed the open-loop gains of system using the three
Fig. 8. The step response comparison with gain variation using IO-PID controller

controller, it is hard to distinguish the three step responses in the Fig. 9 with 20% open-loop gain variations, and the overshoot has almost no change with open-loop gain variation. In Fig. 10, we can nd that the step responses using the FO-[PD] controller with 20% open-loop gain variations have no overshoot, and the performance of the step responses almost have no change. From Figs. 8, 9 and 10, we conclude that the perfor-

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cooperative motion control system platform. DataSocket connection of LabVIEW allows us to write and read data through URL which just like URLs in a web browser. Therefore, we just need to specify a server, so others can read data from the server or write data to the server which makes it convenient to transfer data between two machines. In Fig. 11, a communication program is displayed about the cooperative motion control system.

Fig. 9. The step response comparison with gain variation using FO-PD controller

mance using FO-[PD] controller is the best comparing with those using the IO-PID and FO-[PD] controllers, and the performance using FO-PD is better than that using IO-PID.

Fig. 11.

The communication programme in LabVIEW

Fig. 10. The step response comparison with gain variation using FO-[PD] controller

V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK A. Conclusion In this paper, for the rst time on the LabVIEW hardware-in-the-loop platform which is a fast prototyping experimental setup, we made an experimental study of fractional order proportional derivative (FO-PD) and [proportional derivative] (FO-[PD]) controllers which are designed following systematic schemes. The experimental results validated the advantages of the FO-PD and FO-[PD] controllers over the traditional integer order PID controller under the same design specications. B. Future work In future work, we will build a fractional order cooperative control system using multiple LabVIEW hardware-inthe-loop platforms. As we know, if we want to design two systems to cooperate with each other, the communication is a very important issue. Fortunately, LabVIEW provides some networking features to share data with other VIs over the network, and it can also communicate with other applications and VIs through low-level communication protocols. So we use LabVIEW as a client to subscribe the data and use features in other applications. Specically, the National Instruments DataSocket technology is a good way for us to build

Actually, LabVIEW also can connect with MATLAB/Simulink. As we know that MATLAB uses high performance language for technical computing. Matlab/Simulink can work with RTW (Real-Time Workshop) to test and develop advanced control algorithms. However, Simulink is lack of the virtual instruments to operate, so the LabVIEW connecting with MATLAB/Simulink should be very practically attractive. The Simulation Interface Toolkit is a module provided by LabVIEW. The Toolkit enables LabVIEW to run and communicate with Simulink based on the internet connection. Therefore, we can call the Simulink as Interface Toolkit when high performance computing is required from within the LabVIEW system. A PPENDIX I I NTEGER O RDER PID C ONTROLLER D ESIGN According to the specications (6), (7) and (8), the relationships between parameters Kp1 , Ki1 and Kd1 of the IO-PID controller can be established as follows: Ki1 1 (16) Kd1 = 2 c tan(m + arctan(T c)) Kd1 = |G1 (jc )| = where A1 = T , 1 + (T c )2
2 B1 = (1 + 2A1 Ki2 )c ,

B1

2 4 B1 4A1 c C1 4 2A1 c

(17) =1 (18)

Kp1

2 2 c + (Ki1 Kd1 c )2 2 c

1 + (T c )2

2 2 C1 = A1 c + A1 Ki1 Ki1 ,

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c is the gain crossover frequency of interest, m is the phase margin required. Then, we can get the parameters Kp1 , Ki1 and Kd1 of the IO-PID controller. A PPENDIX II T HE FO-PD CONTROLLER DESIGN The transfer function of FO-PD controller has been introduced in (3). For the second order motion control system, we can derive three equations below for FO-PD design: Kd2 = 1 + ] tan[ + arctan(c T ) c 2 1 (1 ) (1 ) sin cos 2 c 2 Kd2 = |G(jc )| = = where A2 =
B2 = 2A2 c sin

R EFERENCES
[1] I. Podlubny, Fractional-order systems and P I D controller, IEEE Trans. Automatic control, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 208214, 1999. [2] K. S. Miller and B. Ross, An introduction to the fractional calculus and fractional differential equations, Wiley, New York, 1993. [3] D. Xue and Y. Q. Chen, A comparative introduction of four fractional order controllers, Proc. of the 4th IEEE World Congress on Intelligent Conttrollers and Automation (WCICA02), pp. 3228 3235, 2002. [4] A. Oustaloup, J. Sabatier, and P. Lanusse, From fractional robustness to crone control, Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 130, 1999. [5] HongSheng Li, Ying Luo, and YangQuan Chen, A fractional order proportional and derivative motion controller: tuning rule and experiments, IEEE Transactions on Control System Technology (accepted), 2008. [6] I. Falcon Bell, J. Limroth, and K J. Robinson, Integration of hardware into the LabVIEW environment for rapid prototyping and the developnient of control design applications, Proc. of the UKACC Control 2004 Mini Symposia, pp. 7981, 2004. [7] P. Thepsatorn, Numsomran A., Tipsuwanporn V., and T. Teanthong, DC motor speed control using fuzzy logic based on LabVIEW, Proc. of the International Joint Conference on SICE-ICASE, pp. 36173620, 2006. [8] Chien-Lung Cheng Yeh, J. C. Chern, and S. C. Yi-Hung Lan, Automatic testing system based on LabVIEW for DC motor of portable washing machine, Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications, pp. 489493, 2008. [9] YangQuan Chen, Impulse response invariant discretization of fractional order integrators/differentiators compute a discrete-time nite dimensional (z) transfer function to approximate sr with r a real number, Category: Fileter Design and Analysis,Matlab Central http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/leexchange/21342, 2008. [10] YangQuan Chen, Impulse response invariant discretization of fractional order low-pass lters, Category: Fileter Design and Analysis,Matlab Central http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/leexchange/21365, 2008.

(19)

B2

2 2 B2 4A2 c 2 2 2A2 c

(20)

Kp2 1

(1 + Kd2 c cos )2 + (Kd2 c sin )2 2 2

1 + (c T )2 (21)

T , 1 + (c T )2

(1 ) (1 ) 1 c cos . 2 2

By solving the above three equations, the parameters Kp2 , Kp2 and of the FO-PD controller can be retrieved. A PPENDIX III T HE FO-[PD] CONTROLLER DESIGN According to the derivation, the following relationships between Kp3 , Kd3 and are given as follows: Kd3 = 1 1 tan( (m + arctan(T ))) c 2 Kd3 =
2 2 4A3 c 2 2A3 c

(22)

(23)

|G3 (jc | = where

(1 + (Kd3 c )2 ) 2 =1 2 2 (T c )2 + c T . 1 + (T c )2

(24)

A3 =

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Yongshun Jin, Ying Luo and Chunyang Wang would like to thank to the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for the nancial support to visit CSOIS (Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems) at Utah State University as Visiting Scholars.
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