Tracking and Vibration Control with a Parallel Structure Controller Based on a Flexible Ball Screw Drive System

In this paper, we present a parallel structure controller for flexible ball screw drive systems with dynamic variations mainly caused by variations in table position and workpiece mass. The controller consists of two parts: a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller with the aim of tracking reference trajectories with high response and accuracy and an interpolated gain-scheduled controller used to restrain system vibration. To damp out the varied resonant modes, the controller is obtained by a set of μ-synthesis linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers interpolated via Youla parameterization. Comparison experiments are conducted to confirm the performance of the proposed controller with a ball screw drive experimental setup. We demonstrate that the parallel structure controller achieves high performance in tracking, vibration suppression and disturbance rejection.