Abstract
The root-locus method is often employed when a controller is designed to find controller gain. It is usually used to determine one parameter gain while most controllers for industrial applications have more than one controller gain. For example PID controller has three controller gains, i.e. P, I, and D gains. Thus the conventional root-locus technique cannot complete the design of a controller with more than one controller gain. One way to overcome this drawback has been to apply the root-locus technique for one parameter while other parameters are assumed to be proportional to the parameter or to be constant. However this approach could lead to limited performance of the controller and if we try to adjust the proportional ratio or constants then it could be a long and tedious process of trial and error. Thus it is required to find an effective method for the root-locus technique to design controllers with more than one parameter. To this end this paper proposes an extended root-locus method for controllers with two parameters. In this paper Matlab is used as a computation tool to show the effectiveness of our method by solving examples numerically. As a result we obtained an extended root-locus illustrated in two-dimensional space for a control system with two parameters. The paper then presents how to find two controller gains based on this result of the extended root-locus. The main idea is that we can find the parameters by approaching the desired poles. It is expected that the proposed idea will help control engineers to easily design control systems using the root-locus technique, resulting in more accurate and faster control systems. Note that the extended root-locus idea can be applied to controller design problems with multiple parameters.