Switching Gain Scheduled Control Design for Flexible Ball Screw Drives

Abstract

This paper proposes an application of the switching gainscheduled control technique to the flexible ballscrew drive servo system with a wide range of operating conditions. The wide operating range is caused by the change of the table position and the workpiece mass during the machining operation, and leads to plant dynamics variations. To achieve high tracking performance of the table position against the dynamics variations and the cutting force disturbance, a set of gainscheduled controllers is designed so that each controller damps out the resonance of the ballscrew system and increases the closedloop bandwidth for a local operating range, and tracking performance is guaranteed under the switching between these controllers. Experimental results with a laboratoryscale ballscrew drive setup demonstrate that the switching gainscheduled controller outperforms the nonswitching one by up to 52% in tracking accuracy.