Background and Motivation

Dynamic accuracy of manufacturing equipment is greatly affected by the performance of their servo controllers, i.e. feed drive systems. High tracking bandwidth on a motion system can be achieved through various feed-forward techniques, but in practice this approach only works for pick and place type of systems where there are no external disturbances . This research aims to achieve high dynamic stiffness on motion systems by actively damping(controlling) the flexibilities in the structure. Advanced motion control techniques that are cable of actively dampen lightly damped resonances are designed to deliver both high tracking bandwidth and dynamic stiffness.

The highlights of this research are:

- The objective is to design active mode compensating servo controllers that dampen structural modes to achieve high-bandwidth servo control.

- We would like to eliminate the need for expensive feedback sensors such as ultra-high resolution encoders and laser interferometry. Instead, low cost sensors such as mems and piezo based accelerometers are utilized in a sensor fusion framework to realize high fidelity sensing and control.