Energy Consumption in Automatic Control Systems:An Empirical Study

Abstract

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.