FRIT with Dead-Zone Compensation and Its Application to Ultrasonic Motors

Ultrasonic motors (USMs) intrinsically have a dead-zone property which is sensitive to load changes. This paper proposes a fictitious reference iterative tuning (FRIT) method for systems with a dead-zone property such as USMs. The standard FRIT method is basically developed for linear systems and may not give a satisfactory control performance for noninvertible nonlinear systems including USMs. In contrast, the proposed FRIT method can achieve such a performance by introducing a right inverse of a dead-zone function as a dead-zone compensator. In the optimization process of FRIT, the so-called covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is used for simultaneously searching a dead-zone parameter as well as controller parameters. CMA-ES is a kind of stochastic multi-point search techniques and is effective for nondifferentiable and nonconvex optimization problems. Experimental results for a USM are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.