Tuning rules for feedforward control from measurable disturbances combined with PID control: a review

Abstract

Feedforward control can be considered as the most well-known control approach to deal with measurable disturbances. It started to be used almost 100 years ago, and since then it is being used in most industrial processes. It is a very simple technique that has been used typically as a complement to PID control, although it can be combined with any feedback controller. The feedforward control design has traditionally been performed assuming perfect cancellation of the disturbance signal, and when this solution was not possible because of non-realisable problems, static design solutions were usually implemented. In the last decade, this issue has been researched and analysed, and new designs for feedforward control have appeared to face these problems. As a result, a set of new simple tuning rules have been obtained providing considerable improvements in the control system performance. This paper presents a summary of these contributions and a short history of feedforward control.

Keywords:

• Disturbances
• feedforward control
• tuning rules
• PID control
• regulation problem
• tutorial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant number DPI2017 84259-C2-1-R].