Optimal Speed Control for Direct Current Motors Using Linear Quadratic Regulator

Direct Current (DC) motors have been extensively used in many industrial applications. Therefore, the control of the speed of a DC motor is an important issue and has been studied since the early decades in the last century. This paper presents a comparison of time response specification between conventional ProportionalIntegral-Derivatives (PID) controller and Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) for a speed control of a separately excited DC motor. The goal is to determine which control strategy delivers better performance with respect to DC motor’s speed. Performance of these controllers has been verified through simulation using MATLAB/SIMULINK software package. According to the simulation results, liner quadratic regulator method gives the better performance, such as settling time, steady state error and overshoot compared to conventional PID controller. This shows the superiority of liner quadratic regulator method over conventional PID controller.