Autonomous PID controller regulation in nonlinear environments: an application to an automotive engine test bench

Two of the most important topics nowadays, dealing with development of the society, are the concepts of standardization and automation. They are the key through which the humanity can make a step towards a future where the machines will deal with the majority of the jobs, helping the mankind to get rid of boring, dangerous, repetitive or unwanted tasks; giving to many people the possibility to spend their life only doing what they love or desire to do. The steps that are needed to reach this goal are the replacement of human work with robot work and the development of technologies that are able to take care of this change. In this regard, a multidisciplinary approach will be very important in order to handle all the aspects of the process. In this thesis, this multidisciplinary approach will be evident dealing with a complex system like an automotive motor test bench. The aim of this thesis is to standardize many aspects of the actual test that until now are operator-dependent, creating a software environment that will manage these aspects and, at the same time, will propose some solutions based on its internal logic, this will be a software where the experience of the engineers that are working with the test bench will flow into. This thesis work sees as a goal, in practice, the development of a tool that will deal with the regulation of the PID controller of the test bench, this means that in every situation it will be able to compute the controller values to carry out the engine test in the desired way. This is crucial because the cell is a nonlinear system and it will be necessary to adapt many times the controller. The plant where the whole project has been conducted is the FPT Industrial SPA in Turin.