Comparison of classical control and intelligent control for a MIMO system

This paper presents several classical control schemes and intelligent control schemes of an experimental propeller setup, which is called the twin rotor multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system. The objective of this study is to decouple the twin rotor MIMO system into the horizontal plane and vertical plane, and perform setpoint control that makes the beam of the twin rotor MIMO system move quickly and accurately in order to track a trajectory or to reach specified positions. We utilize the conventional control and intelligent control techniques in the vertical and horizontal planes of the twin rotor MIMO system. In classical control, three of the most popular controller design techniques are utilized in this study. These are the Ziegler-Nichols Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) rule, the gain margin and phase margin rule, and the pole placement method. Intelligent control is also proposed in this paper in order to improve the attitude tracking accuracy of the twin rotor MIMO system. Intelligent control designs are based on fuzzy logic system and genetic algorithm. Simulations show that the intelligent controllers have better performance than the classical controllers. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.