Active tape steering control system

Lateral tape motion (LTM) in tape drives hinders accurate servo head positioning and can cause damage to the tape. It is one of the major obstacles to developing high density, high performance tape drives. This paper presents the development an active tape steering system to reduce LTM. The paper also shows the use of Robust Bode (RBode) plot, a relatively new technique for designing robust controllers. The RBode plot translates a robust performance criterion into allowable and forbidden regions on the open-loop Bode plot of a compensated SISO system. With the RBode plot robust controllers can be directly synthesized with classical loop shaping.