Adaptive accelerometer feedforward servo for disk drives

Discusses the design and experimental verification of a direct adaptive control scheme to attenuate the effect of external disturbances on disk drives. The adaptive controller acts as an add-on compensator to the existing fixed compensator. An accelerometer which is mounted on the base casting of the disk drive generates the input signal for the controller The control objective is to minimize the variance of the position error signal in the presence of external random vibrations. Experimental results show that reduction of 92% in the variance of the position error signal can be obtained.