A large-stroke rapid motion controller for servo applications with speed and control constraints

Large-stroke rapid motion is required in many industrial servo systems (e.g. pick-and-place applications), on which constraints of control input and motion speed are usually imposed. This paper presents a hybrid control scheme for large-stroke rapid motion in such systems. The controller resorts to the time-optimal control (TOC) for maximum acceleration initially and then switches into a linear control law to achieve smooth settling. A speed regulation stage is inserted in the tracking process to prevent violating the speed constraint. To tackle the unmeasured speed and unknown disturbance, an extended state observer (ESO) can be included in the controller. The controller is applied to a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) servo system for large-stroke position regulation. Digital simulation via MATLAB is conducted first, followed by an experimental verification using a TMS320F28335 board. The results confirm that the proposed controller can track a wide range of target references with desirable performance under speed constraint and load disturbance and has a competitive advantage over the popular active disturbance-rejection control (ADRC) scheme.