Position Control of a Permanent Magnet DC Motor by Model Reference Adaptive Control

Model reference adaptive control (MRAC) is one of the various techniques of solving the control problem when the parameters of the controlled process are poorly known or vary during normal operation. To understand the dynamic behavior of a dc motor it is required to know its parameters; armature inductance and resistance (L
a
, R
a
), inertia of the rotor (J
m
), motor constant (K
m
), friction coefficient (B
m
), etc. To identify these parameters, some experiments should be performed. However, motor parameters change under operation according to several conditions. Therefore, the performance of controller, which has been designed considering constant motor parameters becomes poorer. For this reason, a model reference adaptive control method is proposed to control the position of a dc motor without requiring fixed motor parameters. Experimental results show how well this method controls the position of a permanent magnet dc motor.