A comparison between a traditional PID controller and an Artificial Neural Network controller in manipulating a robotic arm

Abstract: Robotic and control industry implements different control technique to control the movement and the position of a robotic arm. PID controllers are the most used controllers in the robotics and control industry because of its simplicity and easy implementation. However, PIDs’ performance suffers under noisy environments. In this research, a controller based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) called the model reference controller is examined to replace traditional PID controllers to control the position of a robotic arm in a noisy environment. Simulations and implementations of both controllers were carried out in MATLAB. The training of the ANN was also done in MATLAB using the Supervised Learning (SL) model and Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation algorithm. Results shows that the ANN implementation performs better than traditional PID controllers in noisy environments.