Adaptive Feedforward Control for Disturbance Compensation in Modular Mechatronic Systems

As industry evolution calls for increasingly flexible and efficient systems, mechatronic applications are becoming more modular. Additionally, time-efficient high speed motion during manufacturing requires robust and high performance control. Traditional PID control structures are still commonly employed but struggle with non-linear systems, interactions and strong disturbances. Coupled interactions between controllers of mechanically joined modules during highly dynamic motion/operation are disturbances that degrade the positioning and tracking accuracy. Previous research has been conducted for disturbance and coupling compensation but none have applied it to modular systems. Specifically, the challenge of modular control is limiting control loop interactions by means of sharing data and models. This paper proposes a strategy for modular inter-module disturbance compensation. The proposed controller is validated in simulation. Compared to the traditional PID cascaded control, the proposed feedforward compensation method reduces intermodule disturbance induced tracking error RMSE and maximal amplitude by at least a factor 1.9.