Kalman Filter to Improve Performance of PID Control Systems on DC Motors

A proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller is a type of control system that is most widely applied in industrial world. Various tuning models have been developed to obtain optimal performance in PID control. However, the methods are designed under ideal circumstances. This means that the control system which has been built will not work optimally when noise exists. Noise can come from electrical vibrations, inference of electronic components, or other noise sources. Thus, it is necessary to design PID control system that can work optimally without being disturbed by noise. In this research, Kalman filter was used to improve the performance of PID controllers. The application of Kalman filter was used to reduce the noise of the input signal so that it could generate output signal which is in accordance with the expected output. Simulation result showed that the PID performance with Kalman filter was more optimal than the ordinary one to minimize the existing noise. The resulting speed of DC motor with Kalman filter had a lower overshoot than PID control without Kalman filter. This method resulted lower integral of absolute error (IAE) than ordinary PID controls. The IAE value for the PID controller with the Kalman filter was 25.4, the PID controller with the observer was 31.0, while the IAE value in the ordinary controller was only 60.9.