State-space parameter identification in a second control laboratory

A difficulty usually encountered in the preparation of a state-space-oriented control laboratory is that most of the system identification techniques available in the literature are for input/output models. Although in recent years there has been a growing interest in state-space identification methods, the application of these techniques in undergraduate courses are not immediate since they require a deep knowledge in mathematics and system theory. In this paper, experiments are proposed to estimate the parameters of a second-order state-space system, a dc motor-generator group, whose model plays a key role in a laboratory that deals with state-space design. The efficiency of the proposed experiments is demonstrated with the estimation of all parameters of a real system.