School of Electrical Engineering &

Telecommunications

ELEC4632 Lab 4

Real-time implementation of output feedback

control system for set-point control
In this lab, you are going to implement your non-deadbeat output feedback control system you
designed in Lab 3 on the actual W-T system in real-time to evaluate its performance. However, the
characteristics of the same W-T setup may have slightly changed since the last time you used it.
The valves positions of the W-T setup may also have been changed since then. As a result, your
identified model from Lab 2 and your designed output state feedback controller from Lab 3 are no
longer valid for the W-T setup you are working with in this lab. Thus, for the purpose of this lab,
you must repeat system identification, as what you did in Lab 2, and modify your Lab 3 codes for
set-point control part so that your modified output feedback control system is working properly in
real-time on your specific W-T setup.
This lab is also conducted remotely through Microsoft Teams for online students. The lab exercise
needs to be done on the lab computer as you will implement your control system on the actual
water tank system in the lab. Please note that you will lose access to the lab computer 15
minutes before the lab end time. Make sure to copy all the auto-generated data files and
screenshots of your results to your own computer before the last 15 minutes

Lab Exercise (2 marks)

Make sure that you have your lecture notes on the topics of “Pole Placement Design” and “Digital
Control System Characteristics”, and previous lab notes and your personal notes with yourself.
You can always access lecture and lab notes via Moodle as well. Now, follow the steps below for
this lab exercise.
1. System Identification (0.5 marks, checked after 50 minutes)
a. Repeat system identification on the W-T system as you did before in Lab 2. It is always
important to have a valid model for the process that you are working with at each stage of
practical control system design and implementation. Show your results to the demonstrator
to receive the mark for this part of lab exercise by plotting the figures that you were asked
before in Labs 1 and 2.
2. Output feedback control design (0.5 marks, checked after 1 hour 20 minutes)
a. Once a good model is obtained, design an output feedback control system using your
codes from Lab 3. You just need your results from Set-point control and output feedback
control parts. You can assume initial conditions are zero. Use the same reference signal as
in Lab 3 for the control system to track as fast as possible without exceeding the control

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 input limits, i.e., yref (k) = {0, 0.7, -0.2, 0.5, 0} with each level period to be 140×0.75 =
105sec. Make sure your choice of closed-loop eigenvalues results in control input
remaining within its limits.
3. Real-time implementation of the control system (1 marks, checked after 2 hours and 20
minutes)
a. When you are satisfied with simulation results, download the pre-built Simulink file
named WaterTankSysControl.slx from Moodle. Set your model and controller
parameter in the real-time model as shown in Fig. 1. The parameters are model
matrices G, H, C; state feedback gain L; observer gain K; inverse of close-loop DC
gain Gcl−1(1) named as Gcl_1, and input and output offsets, u_offset and y_offset,
respectively. You just need to assign them with their values in MATLAB Workspace as
Simulink can read them from there. Moreover, you should change the default values in
Saturation TANK#1 block to Vmax and Vmin of your W-T setup. Make sure to use state-
space matrices G, H, C and D of the canonical observable form in the observer
block. In the Simulink model you will have variables G_obs, H_obs, C_obs and
D_obs inside the Observer block. The values of the variables are G_obs=GT,
H_obs=CT, C_obs=HT, and D_obs=DT.

Fig. 1. Pre-built Simulink model for real-time output state feedback control with observer.

b. After making sure all the proper setting are in place, run the Simulink file. The running
time is set to 5×140×0.75 = 525sec or 8 minutes and 45 seconds, and the program will
stop after this time. The data will be recorded in MATLAB Workspace as SFLogData in
Structure format, and it is saved on current directory of MATLAB as
SFControlData_0.mat. Similar to the what was explained in Lab 2 for data
recording, if you repeat the experiment, the new data will be saved under the same
name with an increment of one unit, so you would never lose any test data.

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 c. Online Students: Copy the auto-generated data files (found in
Documents/MATLAB) for both system identification (i.e. all SysIdenData_x.mat)
and control system implementation (i.e. all SFControlData_x.mat) to your own
computer. You will need these results in the final report.

Fig. 2 Actual output feedback control of W-T system result in Simulink

d. Finally, extract the data as shown below and plot them against your simulated results
similar to Fig. 3.
treal = SFLogData.time;
yref = SFLogData.signals(1).values(:,1);
yreal = SFLogData.signals(1).values(:,2);
ureal = SFLogData.signals(2).values;
This figure shows the actual output feedback control results obtained from one of the
W-T systems for which the modelling data was given in
SysIdenData_StudentVersion.mat (the example data that has been used
throughout Lab 1 and Lab3). It compares the real-time results with the simulated ones.
The closed-loop eigenvalues were chosen as [0.9 0.9] for this test with zero initial
conditions. As you can see, the practical results are quite similar to the simulation ones
for output signal in Fig. 3(a) and control input signal in Fig. 3(b). Both simulation output
and control input signals are shifted up by output offset and input offset, respectively.
This confirms that the identified model was accurate enough to represent the process
and to be used for the controller design, as well as validity of the output feedback
control design, particularly from the similarity in the pattern of both the control input
signals and their final values at each period in Fig. 3(b).

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 Fig. 3. Comparison between simulated and actual output feedback control of W-T system in set-point tracking, (a)
Output for different water levels, (b) Control input.

Optional as Bonus: Can you explain the behaviour of the real-time control operation in the first
period (initial transient behavior) shown in Fig. 3? Why is control input in Fig. 2(b) saturated at the
beginning?

V2 by Mr Satish C Verma, Oct 2022.

V1 by Miss Jian Zhang, July 2018.
V0 by Dr. Arash KHATAMIANFAR, July 2017.