Improved LQR Control Using PSO Optimization and Kalman Filter Estimator

The electric motor is a device that converts electrical power into mechanical power. The DC motor has some advantages compared to the AC motor on its easier way to control the speed or position and wide adjustable range. However, it still has some issues, such as uncertainty and disturbance; most existing controllers still provide bad system performance or have major drawbacks in solving these issues. The alternative solution for a control method with simple, easy to design, and can be implemented in a multi-input multi-output system is the integral state feedback control technique, such as in Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The weakness of LQR control is that there is no exact method to determine the best value of matrix Q and R used to calculate the state feedback gain; trial or manual tuning method is mostly used. Therefore, this paper proposed an improved LQR control using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method and the Kalman filter estimator. The PSO was used to find optimal Q and R-value, while the Kalman filter reduced the number of sensors used to measure the system state. Both performance and energy consumption were compared using the Integral of Absolute Error (IAE) and total energy consumption. The simulation results showed that the proposed method is superior in performance and energy compared to manually-tuned LQR. However, based on the hardware implementation, although the manually-tuned LQR was found to have the smallest energy consumption, the proposed method has the smallest IAE, which can reduce the IAE by 11.28% with only 1% higher energy compared to manually-tuned LQR.