A Novel Hybrid Disturbance Offset-Based Active Disturbance Rejection Control Scheme for the Machine Registration in Roll-to-Roll Printing Processes

Abstract

Abstract. During the acceleration phase of roll-to-roll (R2R) processes, uncertain disturbances and coupling effects present significant challenges to achieving high-precision register control. To mitigate hybrid disturbances induced by acceleration, tension fluctuations, and system coupling, this study proposes a hybrid disturbance offset-based active disturbance rejection control (HDOADRC) scheme for registration during the acceleration phase. A hybrid disturbance estimator is designed to quantify perturbations arising from acceleration, tension fluctuations, and system coupling in R2R printing systems. Subsequently, a hybrid disturbance offset is incorporated into HDOADRC to compensate for these perturbations, thereby reducing register errors. Additionally, the actual system output, rather than the observer output, is utilized in computing the feedback control signal, enhancing the performance of linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) methods. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed HDOADRC approach, demonstrating its capability to attenuate hybrid disturbances and minimize register errors. Comparative analyses among HDOADRC, LADRC, model-based self-tuning fully decoupled (MBSTFD), and model-based feed-forward proportional-differential (MFPD) control methods further highlight the superiority of HDOADRC. Specifically, the absolute maximum register errors under HDOADRC are only 75 %, 31 %, and 81 % of those observed in MBSTFD, MFPD, and LADRC, respectively.