Constrained magnetic levitation control
Abstract
This paper shows that the highly nonlinear, unstable and fast system of magnetic levitation can be simply controlled by invariant sets based controller generalizing the pole assignment method for constrained systems. This can be reliably tuned by a modification of the well-known step-response based method by Ziegler and Nichols. As all unstable systems, it is tuned in an iterative manner: In the first phase a stabilizing controller is used to measure the static input-output characteristic and to bring the system to a reference starting position for further dynamic experiments, which can be later evaluated to improve the controller structure and tuning.