LabVIEW based experimental validation of fractional order motion controllers

Fractional calculus has been more and more frequently used in the control domain in recent years. But the fractional order controllers are not widely implemented on the real-time experiments because of the complexity of realization. In this paper, for the first time on the LabVIEW hardware-in-the-loop platform which is a fast prototyping experimental setup, we made an experimental study of the fractional order proportional derivative (FO-PD) and [proportional derivative] (FO-[PD]) controllers which are designed following systematic schemes. The experimental results validated the advantages of the FO-PD and FO-[PD] controllers over the traditional integer order PID controllers designed under the same design specifications. Furthermore, the future work of the cooperative motion control system with multi-LabVIEW platforms for fractional order control is introduced briefly.