Feedback for DC Motor Speed Control using PID

Your approach should work. It's also the simplest way to solve the problem.

You could always work out a position controller that steers directly the motors, but it would be less easy to understand how to tune it. And I understand you have both position and velocity readings, so why not using two loops?

As people's comments to your question highlight, obviously you'd now have a position controller rather than velocity. But it makes sense as it's for a robot.

You need to be careful to a few details:

1. If the two DC motors are working in parallel, you must find a way for the two not to interfere with each other (like forcing load sharing). However you must have faced this problem already in the speed loop.
2. The external loop (position control) is bound to be far slower than the speed loop. If it worked at the same pace, or faster, you'd have the position loop strongly pulling on the speed one without letting it the time to react, and you'd have strong interactions or even instabilities. I suggest that you speed up the internal one (speed) as much as you can, and then tune the external one.
3. The external loop shall here be your 'precise' one. The internal one should just be quick in reaction rather than precise. I'd suggest a P or PD controller for the internal one, and PI or PID for the external one.

Extra tip: as it's for a robot, I'd take into consideration a position reference feed-forward.

Induction motors are called "asynchronous" because they don't go an exact speed based on the ac frequency, not because they can be easily speed controlled using voltage/current limiting instead.

• For a thorough explanation of the motor type, the Wikipedia Article is a great place to start.
• In general terms, induction motors can run with fair efficiency/control between 90-100% of "synchronous speed" (at 50hz, that's 3000rpm divided by the number of coil 'poles' in your motor, which is likely 1), and act as generators between 100-110% of "synchronous speed."
  • The further from 100% of synchronous speed the motor is turning/being turned, the more current it will draw/generate (without external current limiting) to produce torque towards recovering to its synchronous speed.

Thus, for best speed control of an induction motor, you'll need some form of VFD. Luckily, however, being single-pole & only 100W, you could use a rectifier+capacitor to store the power you'll need, then a timing circuit & "Logic-Level Gate" Power MOSFET to generate the needed frequency quite easily (could use as few as 4 total components added to your circuit).