Engineers Studio #92 -- Guest Lecture on Control of Electric Motors for Driving Mechanical Motion

I recently guest lectured for a graduate controls class at one of the engineering schools local to the SF Bay Area. Prior to my lecture, the class had spent time modeling DC Motors, and controlling them with PID control. In my lecture, I built on this, and addressed the following topics:
1. Modeling Mechanics in Simulink
2. Multi-Loop Control -- inner loop for current, and outer loop for mechanics
3. Feedforward Control for mechanics
4. Automatic Tuning of PID gains
5. Characterizing DC Motor with Stall Torque and No-Load Speed