Research ArticleInterpolating gain-scheduled H∞ loop shaping design for high speed ball screw feed drives

- An interpolating gain-scheduled H∞ loop shaping controller is proposed for flexible ball screw drives.
- The time-varying dynamics of the system are considered.
- Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can achieve high tracking performance and disturbance rejection.

This paper presents a method to design servo controllers for flexible ball screw drives with time-varying dynamics, which are mainly due to the time-varying table position and the workpiece mass. A gain-scheduled H∞ loop shaping controller is designed to achieve high tracking performance against the dynamic variations. H∞ loop shaping design procedure incorporates open loop shaping by a set of compensators to obtain performance/robust stability tradeoffs. The interpolating gain-scheduled controller is obtained by interpolating the state space model of the linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers estimated for fixed values of the scheduling parameters and a linear least squares problem can be solved. The proposed controller has been compared with P/PI with velocity and acceleration feedforward and adaptive backstepping sliding mode control experimentally. The experimental results indicate that the tracking performance has been improved and the robustness for time-varying dynamics has been achieved with the proposed scheme.