Dual-stage HDD head positioning using an H∞ almost disturbance decoupling controller and a tracking differentiator

We adopt in this paper a novel control scheme to achieve fast and accurate head positioning for dual-stage actuated hard disk drive (HDD) servo system with actuator saturation and disturbances. This control scheme consists of a tracking differentiator (TD) to avoid actuator saturation as large as possible and an H∞ almost disturbance decoupling controller to deal with disturbances and improve the tracking performance. More specifically, the TD aims to provide a smooth reference signal in a feedforward way so as to reduce the system error, and further decrease the control inputs to both the VCM actuator and the micro-actuator such that the saturation problem can be effectively avoided. The H∞ almost disturbance decoupling controller, when it is applied to control the micro-actuator, is able to almost decouple the disturbance and the controlled output such that satisfactory tracking performance can be achieved. Furthermore, the VCM actuator is controlled by a notch filter in series with a lead compensator so as to stabilize the servo loop. Finally, simulation results in time domain and frequency domain verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.