Energy Consumption in Automatic Control Systems: An Empirical Study

Resumen

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the energy consumption and performance of two widely used control strategies: Sliding Mode Control and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control. While SMC is known for its robustness to structural uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics, it also introduces the undesired effect of chattering. In contrast, PID control offers smoother, continuous control signals and is extensively applied across industrial systems. Adopting an energy-based physics perspective, this study focuses on evaluating the kinetic energy consumption of a controlled plant under each strategy and assesses their respective convergence behaviours with respect to a reference signal. The primary objective is to quantify the trade-off between robustness and energy efficiency to inform practical implementation decisions.