It's one of the fundamental techniques to get PIDs to work properly IRL. I can't find it right now, but I remember having a cheat sheet with a lot of tricks to make PIDs work properly. As a control engineer you learn a lot of fancy techniques, of which you usually only use a few, but practical PID control is sadly not taught in most courses because it's basically a collection of hacks.
If you know a little bit more about the system's behavior you can usually precalculate the optimal inputs and use the PID only for course correction, that often yields much better responses than what you can achieve with a controller alone.
If your system is nonlinear, it might be useful to use gain scheduling to adapt the PID parameters to the setpoint region you're operating in.
Switching behaviors in the system can also mess up your responses.
Sometimes your system has a vibrating frequency that can lead to resonance in your control. You may need to filter that, too, maybe even with a sliding frequency window. E.g. when controlling a gearbox attached to a motor, you don't want to actuate at the motor's vibrating frequency.
>smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken
It's not so surprising if you think about what a low pass filter does. By filtering out the high frequencies the response becomes more sluggish, meaning that your input to the PID is already delayed. This means your PID reacts more slowly.
It's one of the fundamental techniques to get PIDs to work properly IRL. I can't find it right now, but I remember having a cheat sheet with a lot of tricks to make PIDs work properly. As a control engineer you learn a lot of fancy techniques, of which you usually only use a few, but practical PID control is sadly not taught in most courses because it's basically a collection of hacks.
If you know a little bit more about the system's behavior you can usually precalculate the optimal inputs and use the PID only for course correction, that often yields much better responses than what you can achieve with a controller alone.
If your system is nonlinear, it might be useful to use gain scheduling to adapt the PID parameters to the setpoint region you're operating in.
Switching behaviors in the system can also mess up your responses.
Sometimes your system has a vibrating frequency that can lead to resonance in your control. You may need to filter that, too, maybe even with a sliding frequency window. E.g. when controlling a gearbox attached to a motor, you don't want to actuate at the motor's vibrating frequency.
>smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken
It's not so surprising if you think about what a low pass filter does. By filtering out the high frequencies the response becomes more sluggish, meaning that your input to the PID is already delayed. This means your PID reacts more slowly.