A MECHATRONIC APPROACH TO FULL SHEET CONTROL USING STEER-ABLE NIPS

State of the art high speed color printers require sheets be accurately positioned as they arrive at the image transfer station. To accomplish this goal, a steerable nips mechanism has been designed and built. This mechanism is located upstream from the image transfer station. This steerable nips mechanism allows sheets to be precisely controlled in the longitudinal, lateral, and skew directions. In this paper we present the design, sensing strategy, and a control law based on state feedback linearization. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed controller is able to correct for paper position errors in the above mentioned directions under the condition that the sheet has nonzero initial and final velocities. The system model is nonlinear and subject to four nonholonomic constraints.