Design and implementation of a 2-DOF PID compensation for magnetic levitation systems

This paper employs a 2-DOF (degree of freedom) PID controller for compensating a physical magnetic levitation system. It is shown that because of having a feedforward gain in the proposed 2-DOF PID control, the transient performance of the compensated system can be changed in a desired manner unlike the conventional 1-DOF PID control. It is also shown that for a choice of PID parameters, although the theoretical loop robustness is the same for both the compensated systems, in real-time, 2-DOF PID control may provide superior robustness if a suitable choice of the feedforward parameter is made. The results are verified through simulations and experiments.