A New Scheme for a Mechanical Load Position Control Driven by a Permanent Magnet DC Motor and a Nonzero Backlash Gearbox

In this paper, a new scheme for position control of a mechanical load driven by a permanent magnet DC motor and a gearbox is presented. The gearbox is assumed to have some amount of backlash. The paper derives a model for the backlash nonlinear behavior. It then proposes a new control structure composed of feedback and feed forward control systems. The feedback control system is designed based on zero backlash. The feed forward part is employed to minimize the backlash effects. The new method is evaluated via simulations in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. Simulations results are provided to show the response of the proposed technique to various input references