Control of ball screw drives based on disturbance response optimization

This paper presents a new method for designing control laws for ball screw drives by directly optimizing the load side disturbance response against cutting forces. The design applies, concurrently, the principles of pole placement and loop shaping, and is easy to implement in practice. In addition to good low frequency disturbance rejection, the control law provides active vibration damping, which reduces the magnification of tracking errors near the drive's mechanical resonance. Effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated in machining and high speed tracking experiments, where its performance is compared to the industry standard P-PI cascade control law.