DC motor speed control by embedded PI controller with hardware-in-loop simulation

The conventional controllers such as PD, PI and PID have been widely used in industry and have demonstrated good control performance for different industrial plants. These conventional controllers have always been the very first choice for controlling any industrial plant due to its simple structure. The conventional controllers have been implemented in industry by analog circuits. These analog circuits impose some limitations, when there is a need for retuning the controller. Sometimes, the complete hardware of the controller needs to be modified. Today, a wide variety of embedded processors are available and these processors can be used to implement the conventional controllers. This paper presents an implementation of digital PI controller on an 8-bit microcontroller. This PI controller is tested for the plant model of DC motor by hardware-in-loop simulation technique. In this HIL simulation, the PI controller is on implemented on a microcontroller and the plant model is in simulation environment. Results have shown that this embedded PI controller is able to offer good control in HIL simulation.