Control system design of a linear motor feed drive system using virtual friction

This paper proposes a friction compensator and a design method for control systems to improve the response characteristics of linear motor feed drive systems. The proposed friction compensator cancels the real nonlinear friction of feed drive systems by using the nonlinear friction model proposed in this study and introduces virtual linear friction to facilitate the control system design. The proposed design method enables the determination of servo gains and friction compensator parameters that lead to desirable tracking performance and disturbance rejection without many trial-and-error tuning processes. In addition, the proposed method facilitates the design of the velocity feedforward compensator by using the inverse transfer function of the velocity control loop to correct the position tracking errors for various position commands. The effectiveness of the proposed method with the friction compensator and the velocity feedforward compensator was verified in simulations and experiments using a one-axis feed drive system consisting of a rod-type linear motor and linear roller guides. The results confirmed that the proposed method enables desirable overshoot-free responses and corrects motion trajectory errors due to nonlinear friction characteristics, and the proposed velocity feedforward compensator can correct tracking errors in both constant velocity motion and circular motion.