Accurate control of ball screw drives using pole-placement vibration damping and a novel trajectory prefilter

► We present a simple and effective controller that enhances the accuracy of ball screw drives by applying vibration damping. ► The base design uses pole-placement for damping out structural vibrations while imposing desired rigid body dynamics. ► A new prefilter is developed that removes quasi-static correlations of the commanded trajectory from the tracking error. ► The proposed design is compared to the mainstream P-PI position velocity cascade controller used in industry. ► The proposed design achieves better disturbance rejection, and 20-50% smaller dynamic positioning error.