OT Tuning the Motion Control Loop Article

FYI,

Frequent PLCS contributor Peter Nachtwey had an article published in the current issue of the engineering magazine Design News, see http://www.designnews.com/article/CA632571.html. It's clear, well written, and easy to understand as are his postings on this message board.

Congratulations, Peter, and keep up the great work of passing on your knowledge to others.

MikeW

Mike,

Yes, I've seen other articles by Mr. Nachtwey.

He does write informative goodies.

Keep up the good work Peter.

Rod

MikeW, Thanks for pointing that out.

I write the articles and seldom have time to see how they end up. What I liked about writing this article was that I was given more freedom ( words ) than what I get in most. The series that Design News is doing is called "Deep Dive" This allowed me to go deeper into tuning. What you guys might not realize is that the editors like to keep things a lot simpler but often water down to the point where there isn't much real information. I get asked to remove formulas, paragraphs reduce words count because they are to long a detailed.

I would like to get an idea percentage of readers that actually have some idea of what I am saying. If it is only 10% I think it is worth it. The key thing is that the theory works and it does make like easier. I was told by one OEM they allow a day to tune each axis. Some of these projects have 40-60 axes. Tuning all those axes takes too much time so something had to be done.

Design new did get the phi, theta wrong. They substituted a O umlaut and E dot in instead. Oops. The formulas for the tuning the Ki, Kp and Kd also have symbols that are changed. I guess they could use Greek characters. Oops again.

You guys probably know by now I don't tune PID gains if I can calculate them. I will be using this info tomorrow in a evaulation/test.

The comments at the bottom of the article seem to be from fans in the hydraulic industry that have used our product.

Design new did get the phi, theta wrong. They substituted a O umlaut and E dot in instead. Oops. The formulas for the tuning the Ki, Kp and Kd also have symbols that are changed. I guess they could use Greek characters. Oops again.

Click to expand...

That had me a bit puzzled as well, I must have spent about 2 minutes trying to find the Lambda before giving up!