What are the rules for sketching a root locus?¶
I hope to be able to find the time to create a pencast on this topic, but in the mean-time try asking the question on Google: What are the rules for sketching a root locus?. There are a lot of useful resources but you won’t learn the rules by reading them, you have to try some examples – practice makes perfect. Here are some resources that I picked out as useful:
There is a section on this topic in the recommended reading for this module, The Control Theory Wikibook: Root Locus
Rules for Making Root Locus Plots by Eric Deever of the Department of Engineering at Swarthmore College (USA), and
Root Locus Sketching Rules, from MIT OpenCourseware.
(Don’t just stop at the page links given here, explore the rest of these sites as well.)
An additional tip: a benefit of having access to Matlab is that you can easily plot a root locus to see what the answer should be. Try looking up “help rlocus” for usage information.