On Replacing PID Controller with ANN Controller for DC Motor Position Control

The process industry implements many techniques with certain parameters in its operations to control the working of several actuators on field. Amongst these actuators, DC motor is a very common machine. The angular position of DC motor can be controlled to drive many processes such as the arm of a robot. The most famous and well known controller for such applications is PID controller. It uses proportional, integral and derivative functions to control the input signal before sending it to the plant unit. In this paper, another controller based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) control is examined to replace the PID controller for controlling the angular position of a DC motor to drive a robot arm. Simulation is performed in MATLAB after training the neural network (supervised learning) and it is shown that results are acceptable and applicable in process industry for reference control applications. The paper also indicates that the ANN controller can be less complicated and less costly to implement in industrial control applications as compared to some other proposed schemes.