| Abstract: | Traction drives are direct-drive systems that are more sensitive to noise and disturbances than lead screws. Their performance using PID control is not always satisfactory. Therefore, there is a need to improve the tracking performance of traction drives while overcoming their inherent sensitivity to disturbances. To understand their behavior better, their operating characteristics are investigated and a system model is developed. Using this model, a state feedback regulator is designed. To eliminate steady-state errors to step commands and improve tracking performance, an outer PID loop is added. The performance of this controller is then compared with that of a PID controller. It is shown that the state feedback/PID scheme rejects disturbances more than three times as fast as the PID controller and reduces tracking errors by over 50%. |
