Short seeking by multirate digital controllers for computation saving with initial value adjustment

Multirate control has been proposed to reduce the real-time computation in hard disk drive (HDD) servo systems. It has been showed that computation can be saved greatly without performance degradation by using a multirate controller for track following. This paper proposes a novel method for short seeking control based on multirate track following control and initial value adjustment. This method, which uses the same multirate controller and the same servo structure as track following, adjusts the initial values of the track following controller for short seeking. Real-time computation is greatly saved in two aspects: 1) computation is saved by multirate scheme, and 2) initial value adjustment of the feedback controller makes the use of the feed-forward controller and reference trajectory unnecessary. Simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Integral sliding mode control with a disturbance observer for next-generation servo track writing

In this paper, we propose a new control scheme that provides position and velocity profile tracking control for next-generation servo track writing (STW). Whereas conventional servo track writers require controllers that perform fast positioning control with fast track seeking and regulation, spiral servo track writers require accurate position and velocity profile tracking control to achieve high quality servo patterns on the media disk. Because STW timing eventually renders geometrically accurate servo patterns, both position and velocity error signals should be regulated within small bounds in a constant velocity region. Regulation via an integral sliding mode controller (SMC) is known to provide good tracking performance; however, use of a high switching gain is inappropriate for an actuator with resonance modes. In this paper, we therefore apply integral sliding mode control with a disturbance observer to STW. The relationship between eigenvalues and control gains is mathematically analyzed to improve dynamic tracking response. To verify the utility of the proposed position and velocity profile tracking control, we perform a comparative study between the proposed and conventional control methods and experimentally validate the performance of the proposed method.     

High-performance robust motion control of machine tools: an adaptive robust control approach and comparative experiments

This paper studies the high-performance robust motion control of machine tools. The newly proposed adaptive robust control (ARC) is applied to make the resulting closed-loop system robust to model uncertainties, instead of the disturbance observer (DOB) design previously tested by many researchers. Compared to DOB, the proposed ARC has a better tracking performance and transient in the presence of discontinuous disturbances, such as Coulomb friction, and it is of a lower order. As a result, time-consuming and costly rigorous friction identification and compensation is alleviated, and overall tracking performance is improved. The ARC design can also handle large parameter variations and is flexible in introducing extra nonlinear robust control terms and parameter adaptations to further improve the transient response and tracking performance. An anti-integration windup mechanism is inherently built in the ARC and, thus, the problem of control saturation is alleviated. Extensive comparative experimental tests are performed, and the results show the improved performance of the proposed ARC.     

Design and Performance Tuning of Sliding-Mode Controller for High-Speed and High-Accuracy Positioning Systems in Disturbance Observer Framework

The tuning method of controllers can be used for effectively determining the overall performance of positioning systems. In particular, this method is highly effective in the case of high-speed and high-accuracy positioning systems. In this paper, a sliding-mode controller that uses one of the well-known approaches of robust control methodology is designed for high-speed positioning systems that require a high-accuracy performance. A performance-tuning method based on a disturbance observer (DOB) structure is also proposed. First, a generalized disturbance attenuation framework named robust internal-loop compensator (RIC) is introduced, and a sliding-mode controller based on a Lyapunov redesign is analyzed in the RIC framework. Then, the DOB properties of the sliding-mode controller are presented, and it is shown that the performance of the closed-loop system with a sliding-mode controller can be tuned up by using the structural characteristics of the DOB. These results make the design of an enhanced sliding-mode controller possible. Finally, the proposed algorithm is experimentally verified and discussed with two positioning systems. Experimental results show the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed scheme.     

Development of robust motor servo control for rear steering actuator based on two-degree-of-freedom control system

A rear steering system can improve vehicle stability by actively controlling the rear wheel angles. For designing the rear steering system, environmental conditions, performance deterioration due to aging and component variation as a result of manufacturing tolerance under mass production must be taken into consideration. We have applied two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) feedback control with feed-forward control for the motor servo control so that the rear steering actuator can track the target rear steering angle accurately and stably. The control system is designed based upon a nominal mathematical model and its variation range.As a result, the rear steering actuator can be controlled with excellent performance and high reliability. This paper describes the mathematical model construction in the frequency domain and a robust motor servo controller design based on 2DOF feedback control with feed-forward control.     

Nonlinear Tracking Control for a Hard Disk Drive Dual-Stage Actuator System

This paper presents a nonlinear tracking control method for a hard disk drive dual-stage actuator (DSA) system that consists of a voice coil motor (VCM) actuator and a piezoelectric (PZT) microactuator. Conventional track seeking controllers for DSA systems were generally designed to enable the VCM actuator to approach the target track without overshoot. However, we observe that this strategy is unable to achieve the minimal settling time when the target tracks are beyond the PZT actuator stroke limit. To further reduce the settling time, we design the VCM actuator controller to yield a closed-loop system with a small damping ratio for a fast rise time and certain allowable overshoot. Then, a composite nonlinear control law is designed for the PZT actuator to reduce the overshoot caused by the VCM actuator as the system output approaches the target track. Experimental results show that the proposed dual-stage servo outperforms the conventional dual-stage servo in short-span seeking and, additionally, achieves better track following accuracy than the VCM only single-stage servo.     

Three-phase single-stage four-switch PFC buck-boost-type rectifier

This paper proposes a new three-phase single-stage power-factor corrector buck-boost-type rectifier topology. The typical topology uses a bridge configuration with six switches. This new topology only requires four switches, improving the rectifier efficiency as only one reverse-blocking power semiconductor conducts at any time. A vector-based sliding-mode control method for the three-phase input currents is also proposed. This fast and robust technique uses sliding mode to generate /spl alpha//spl beta/ space-vector modulation, which forces the input line currents to track a suitable sinusoidal reference. A near-unity power-factor operation of the rectifier is obtained using a sinusoidal reference in phase with the input source voltages. A proportional-integral controller is adopted to regulate the output voltage of the converter. This external voltage controller modulates the amplitude of the current references. The characteristics of the new rectifier are verified with experimental results.     

Mode switching control design with initial value compensation andits application to head positioning control on magnetic disk drives

To meet an increasing demand for high performance and large-capacity in magnetic hard disk drives, both fast response and precise positioning are strongly required for the head positioning control. A mode switching control (MSC) system, which includes a track seeking controller, a track following controller, and a switching function, is widely used to meet this requirement. The issue for MSC is to confirm a design method of servo mode switching. This paper proposes the initial value compensation method (IVC). The IVC inputs certain initial values in the controller state variables at mode switching in order to improve the transient response after switching. There are two approaches to determine the values: (1) minimizing a linear-quadratic function of the plant state variables; and (2) cancelling the unfavorable poles of the transfer function between initial values and head position by relocating zeros. Some experimental results are shown to be effective     

Robust loop shaping-fuzzy gain scheduling control of a servo-pneumatic system using particle swarm optimization approach

In this paper, a new technique called robust loop shaping-fuzzy gain scheduled control (RLS-FGS) is proposed to design an effective nonlinear controller for a long stroke pneumatic servo system. In our technique, a nonlinear dynamic model of a long stroke pneumatic servo plant is identified by the fuzzy identification method and is used as the plant for our design. The structure of local controllers is selected as PID control which is proven by many research works that this type of control has many advantages such as simple structure, well understanding, and high performance. The proposed technique uses particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find the optimal local controllers which maximize the average stability margin. In addition, performance weighting function which is normally difficult to obtain is automatically determined by PSO. By the proposed technique, the RLS-FGS controller can be designed, and the structure of local controllers is still not complicated. As seen in the simulation and experimental results, our proposed technique is better than the classical gain scheduled PID controller tuned by pole placement and the conventional fuzzy PID controller tuned by ISE method in terms of robust performance.     

Precision Positioning of Hard Disk Drives Using Piezoelectric Actuators With Passive Damping

Positioning precision is crucial to today's increasingly high-speed, high-capacity, high-data-density, and miniaturized hard disk drives (HDDs). The demand for higher bandwidth servo systems that can quickly and precisely position the read/write head on a high track density becomes more pressing. The idea of applying dual-stage actuators to track servo systems has been studied. However, the current dual-stage actuator design uses only piezoelectric patches without passive damping. In this paper, we propose a dual-stage servo system using enhanced active-passive hybrid piezoelectric actuators. The proposed actuators will improve the existing dual-stage actuators for higher precision and shock resistance, due to the incorporation of passive damping in the design. We aim to develop this hybrid servo system not only to increase the speed of track seeking but also to improve the precision of track following servos in HDDs. New piezoelectrically actuated suspensions with passive damping have been designed and fabricated. In order to evaluate positioning and track following performances for the dual-stage track servo systems, experimental efforts are carried out to investigate the damping abilities and transmissibilities of the microactuators and to implement the synthesized active-passive suspension structure using a composite nonlinear feedback controller.     

High-gain observer-based integral sliding mode tracking control for heavy vehicle electro-hydraulic servo steering systems

The electro-hydraulic servo steering system (EHSSS) is the key element to determine the handling and stability of heavy vehicles. Accurate steering control is challenged due to its complicated structure and a wide range of steering loads. In this paper, an output feedback integral sliding mode control (ISMC) method based on high-gain observer is proposed to solve this issue. First, a new Hurwitz matrix design method is presented for EHSSS with non-chain integrator, in order to prove the convergence of the observer error dynamics. Then, the Lyapunov stability of the observer-based controller is verified. Finally, a test bench is established to experimentally validate the proposed method's effectiveness through multiple test scenarios. The results show the tracking error of the proposed method is significantly smaller than PI and similar to full-state feedback integral sliding mode controller. This paper provides a valuable reference for high-gain observer-based nonlinear control applied to a typical electro-hydraulic servo steering system.     

Piezoelectric vibration control for all-clamped panel using DOB-based optimal control

Considering the spillover and harmonic effect in real active vibration control, a novel composite controller based on disturbance observer (DOB) for the all-clamped panel is presented. The single-mode of the piezoelectric panel can be regarded as a second-order system. The unmodeled error of the current controlled mode, harmonic effects, uncontrolled mode effects, etc., are regarded as the lumped disturbances which can be estimated by the DOB, and the estimated value is used for the feed-forward compensation design. Then, an optimal linear quadratic regulator (LQR) strategy is employed for the feedback design. In order to solve the difficulty of determining the weight matrices of LQR, a chaos optimization method based on logistic map is proposed. So the weight matrices can be tuned automatically. Combining with a new transient performance function, the optimal weight matrices can be obtained. The composite controller can effectively suppress the lumped disturbances of the all-clamped panel. Experiment comparisons with conventional LQR are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Head-positioning control using resonant modes in hard disk drives

The best way to enhance the input/output (I/O) performance of a hard disk drive is by increasing the spindle speed. Therefore, the effect of windage vibrations caused by the airflow increases as the spindle speed increases. The servo bandwidth is limited by the primary resonant frequency of the mechanical system. However, the frequencies of the windage vibrations are higher than the primary resonant frequency. Accordingly, these frequencies are also above the servo bandwidth and are too high to be controlled by a conventional control system. In response to this problem, we have developed two methods for designing a servo control system that can suppress the windage vibrations. One method uses a stable mechanical resonant mode, and the other uses a stable resonant mode created by a digital filter. By using these methods, the head-positioning system can control the vibrations above the frequency of the primary resonant mode and the servo bandwidth. Application of these methods to actual hard disk drives showed that they can greatly decrease the windage vibrations, in which the peak frequency is about six times the open-loop gain 0-dB crossover frequency.     

Decoupling internal model control for the robust engagement of clutches

Research on the robustness of clutch engagement control is attracting considerable interest because of its wide applications in advanced powertrains. Internal model control (IMC) is advantageous because it can handle model errors and external disturbances with light computational loads. However, during clutch engagement, two control inputs (engine output torque and clutch transmitted torque) and two system outputs (driving speed and the driven part of the clutch) are coupled; moreover, the two reference inputs are considerably different. A method for directly decoupling and stabilizing multi-input multi-output systems controlled by a two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) IMC is proposed based on the construction of V-canonical matrices. The proposed method allows simple expressions for the control algorithm to be obtained without computing an inverse matrix that is used conventionally. Two filters, considering both the reference inputs and system characteristics, are independently designed considering the decoupling operation. The simulation results show that the proposed decoupling 2DOF IMC gains a considerably less tracking error and better robustness to model error and disturbance compared to classical 2DOF IMC and model predictive control. The performance is validated via dynamometer experiments.     

Disturbance observer design with Bode’s ideal cut-off filter in hard-disc-drive servo system

In order to improve the disturbance compensation performance under vibrations in hard-disc-drive servo system, Bode’s ideal cut-off (BICO) filter is applied for the disturbance observer (DOB) design. New DOB is designed with BICO low pass filter (LPF) substituting the normal LPF in the original DOB design. With this BICO LPF, the new DOB can achieve strengthened attenuation of error sensitivity in disturbance frequency range to obtain better disturbance compensation performance while maintaining the robust specifications. This benefit comes from the less phase loss property of the BICO filter. Meanwhile, the BICO filter with the property of sharp roll-off magnitude is applied for the disturbance frequency range detection filter design. Using this BICO identification filter, multiple-DOB control can be used for the disturbance compensation based on the switching according to the disturbance detection. Industrial drive level experimental results are included to validate the proposed new DOB scheme under vibration.     

MOSFET Converter-Fed Position Servo System with Sliding Mode Control

Sliding mode control is an effective means to keep a system insensitive to parametric variations and disturbances. In the conventional sliding mode control applied to position servo systems, the sliding mode regime is restricted near the origin, and, therefore, insensitivity cannot be ensured throughout an entire response. This paper presents a new method in which a sliding curve is used instead of a straight line. The sliding curve is defined in such a way that in general the system responds following a max acceleration curve, then a max speed curve, and finally a max deceleration curve. Experimental results confirm that the new method can keep the system robust completely throughout a transient response, which demonstrates the advantage of the proposed sliding curve over the conventional sliding mode strategy.     

Integrated model predictive control and velocity estimation of electric vehicles

In this paper, an integrated estimation and control system is developed for the stability and traction control of electric vehicles. A model predictive control technique is used to track the desired vehicle yaw rate while maintaining small lateral velocity and tire slip ratios. This paper proposes a new method to control the lateral stability of the vehicle. In this method, the lateral vehicle velocity is controlled indirectly by adjusting the reference yaw rate. This reduces the size of the prediction model and its computational complexity. The controller requires the vehicle’s lateral and longitudinal velocities as well as its tire forces for stability and traction control. This paper also proposes a novel velocity estimation scheme that uses the combined vehicle kinematics and tire model. The developed Kalman-based estimator provides velocities and lateral forces at each corner that are robust to changes in the road condition. The combined model-based and kinematic-based estimation structure mitigates some common problems of the widely used kinematic-based estimators such as the spikes and drifting issues. The stability of the proposed time-varying estimator is also investigated. The designed control and estimation scheme are experimentally validated on various driveline configurations and proven to provide reliable results.     

Short track seeking of hard disk drives under multirate control-computationally efficient approach based on initial value compensation

This paper proposes a design method for short track-seeking control based on one degree of freedom (ODOF) control and initial value compensation (IVC). IVC uses nonzero initial values of the feedback controller to improve the step reference response of the ODOF tracking control system. This makes feedforward control unnecessary to shape the transient response of short track seeking. As a result, the amount of computation during short track seeking may be minimal. The proposed design method minimizes tracking errors in multirate control framework for a step reference input taking into account the inter-sampling behavior. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by simulation and experiment.     

Advanced disturbance observer design for mechanical positioning systems

Disturbance-observer (DOB)-based controller design is one of the most popular methods in the field of motion control. In this paper, the generalized disturbance compensation framework, named the robust internal-loop compensator (RIC) is introduced and an advanced design method of a DOB is proposed based on the RIC. The mixed sensitivity optimization problem, which is the main issue of DOB design, is also solved through the parametrization of the DOB in the RIC framework. Differently from conventional methods, the Q-filter is separated from the mixed sensitivity optimization problem and a systematic design law for the DOB is proposed. This guarantees the robustness and optimality of the DOB and enables the design for unstable plants.