Modeling, Control and Simulation of Cascade Control Servo System for one Axis Gimbal Mechanism

The gimbal stabilization mechanism is used to provide the stability to an object mounted on the gimbal by isolating it from the base angular motion and vibration. The purpose of this paper is to present a model of control servo system for one axis gimbal mechanism using a cascade PID controller. The gimbal torque relationships are derived by taking into consideration the base angular motion. The conventional PID controller and three cascade controller structures are investigated. The servo control loop is built and modelled in MATLAB/Simulink using these controllers. The simulation results are compared and the servo system performance is analysed for each controller in terms of performance criteria. The comparison results prove that a further improved system performance is achieved using I-PD controller as compared to the system performance obtained when the other controllers are utilized. The paper’s value lies in designing the servo control system using a modified controller constitutes of tow parallel I-PD controllers related with a switch depends on the base angular rate as a threshold. The results show that the modified system realizes the desired servo system requirements.