plant input, can be interfaces for serial, UDP, or other interfaces for writing data to
hardware.
The default ports of the autotuner block are:
- u — Receives the control signal.
- y — Receives the plant output.
- start/stop — Receives the signal that begins and ends the tuning process.
- u+Δu — Outputs the signal to feed to the plant input. When the experiment is not
running, u+Δu outputs the control signal as input at u. When the experiment is
running the block and injects the test signals at u+Δu. For open-loop tuning only, the
block breaks the loop between u and u+Δu for the duration of the experiment. When
the experiment ends, the block restores the connection between u and u+Δu. - % conv — Outputs a numeric indicator of the progress of the frequency-response
estimation experiment. - pid gains — Outputs the tuned PID gains when the tuning process stops.
In this configuration, the PID controller itself exists in another module of your system.
When tuning is complete, you use your own logic to write the tuned PID gains from the
pid gains port of the autotuning block to your PID controller.
Deployable Module with Controller
Alternatively, you can deploy a module that includes both the PID controller and the PID
autotuning algorithm, such as shown in the following illustration. An advantage of this
approach is that it facilitates retuning a specific controller in an individual system.
PID Autotuning in Real Time