Design and Development of a Tunable Proportional Integral Derivative (Tpid) Controller for a Robotic Arm

The main targets in designing control systems are stability, good disturbance rejection, and small tracking error. Several industrial robot manipulators are controlled by linear methodologies such as Proportional-Derivative (PD) controller, Proportional-Integral (PI) controller or Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers. In this work, a Tunable Proportional Integral Derivative (TPID) controller is proposed for the control of a robotic arm. This tuning method is an attempt to obviate the shortcomings of the conventional PID controller where the proportional gain KP, integral gain KI and derivative gain KD, are fixed. The proposed controller provides opportunity for tuning the PID to be able to control the nonlinear movements and operations of a robot. The robot arm manipulator can be tuned as desired to provide control measures to enhance stability and suppress vibrations arising from robot arm operation. Simulation results showed an improvement over conventional PID controller for robotic arm manipulator.