Conclusion

Servo tuning need not be more difficult than other typical motion tasks such as sizing a motor. There are a number of standard manual methods available, two of which, step-response tuning and zone-based tuning, are discussed in this article. Autotuning holds out the promise of eliminating human involvement in the process of servo tuning, but at present, most auto-tuning packages are designed to provide workable initial values, which are then further hand-optimized for a specific application.

Once your basic PID parameters have been determined, techniques such as feed-forward, and bi-quad filtering can be used to further improve performance, or increase smoothness.

Regardless of the process by which you arrive at your tuning parameters, make sure that you exercise your system over the complete load range expected for your application, and if possible, on both new and older hardware to insure that your system will run correctly under real-world conditions.