Pre-compensation of servo contour errors using a model predictive control framework

Methods for pre-compensating contour errors in servo systems by adding components of the predicted contour error to the reference position command have recently been proposed in the literature. Such methods are very effective when the curvatures of the desired path are small but their performance degrades at locations of sharp curvature because they lack look-ahead capabilities. This paper presents an improved method for pre-compensating contour errors in servo systems by modifying reference position commands using a model predictive control framework. The pre-compensation value at any given location along the desired path is defined as a weighted average of contour errors within a prediction horizon, and the weights are selected to minimize the sum of squares of the estimated contour errors over the chosen prediction horizon. Constraint enforcement functionalities are also built into the proposed method to ensure that the pre-compensated reference commands stay within specified velocity and acceleration limits. Simulations and experiments are used to compare the performance of the proposed method to a recently proposed pre-compensation approach which lacks look-ahead and constraint enforcement capabilities. Significant improvements in contouring accuracy over the existing method are demonstrated.