Control of hysteresis in smart actuators with application to micro-positioning

Hysteresis in smart material actuators makes the effective use of these actuators quite challenging. The Preisach operator has been widely used to model smart material hysteresis. Motivated by positioning applications of smart actuators, this paper addresses the value inversion problem for a class of discretized Preisach operators, i.e., to find an optimal input trajectory given a desired output value. This problem is solved through optimal state transition of a finite state machine (FSM) that corresponds to the discretized Preisach operator. A state-space reduction scheme for the FSM is developed, which significantly saves the memory and the computation time. Experimental results on micro-positioning control of a magnetostrictive actuator are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.