Validating DC Motor Models on the Quanser Qube Servo

DC motors are popular for many engineering applications such as robotics, aerospace, home automation, and many others. As such, they are also popular systems for undergraduate examples and instructional laboratories in engineering. Many of these examples use a standard first-order model of a DC Motor using first principles modeling to derive the parameters. However, not much emphasis is placed on how well these models match the actual data. In this paper, six DC motor models, including three frequently found in textbook examples, will be compared to recorded data from actual DC motors in order to develop a model that represents the actual physical behavior of a DC motor. The models that were developed from the data rather than first principles matched the data more closely for the angular velocity output of the motor. Finally, the best models will be used to simulate a closed-loop position control of the motor and match the performance to recorded data.