Iterative Controller Tuning by Real-Time Optimization

The present article looks at the problem of iterative controller tuning, where the parameters of a given controller are adapted in an iterative manner to bring a user-defined performance metric to a local minimum for some repetitive process. Specifically, we cast the controller tuning problem as a real-time optimization (RTO) problem, which allows us to exploit the available RTO theory to enforce both convergence and performance guarantees. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodology on an experimental torsional system and note that the results are particularly promising considering the simplicity of the method.