Implementing Discrete Control for the Horizontal Positioning of an Industrial Manipulator Using MATLAB

The presented paper descries the implementation of a discrete control law, for an industrial manipulator, using MATLAB as computer software. The software implementation is done in order to test the overall performances of the discrete control law, since the on-site testing is not possible due tot the continuous functioning of the industrial manipulator as an unloading billets machine from a rotary hearth furnace, part of the hot rolling process. First, the magnitude optimum criterion, the Kessler variant, is applied as tuning method for the industrial manipulator’s positioning system since the continuous model is already known, due to prior research. Further, the discrete control is derived from the pulse transfer function yielded from digitizing the continuous control. The discrete control law is implemented as a discrete control structure using unit delay blocks and as a dependency law using the MATLAB function block. The overall performances are tested, and they meet the performance expected by Kessler's tuning method.