Experimental verification of component swapping modularity for precision contouring

Design for component swapping modularity (CSM) is experimentally verified for a precision contouring algorithm. Prior work focuses on developing CSM algorithms for various systems and verifying the results using numerical simulations [1], [3], [8]. This work uses empirical and analytical methods to support the effectiveness of CSM in precision distributed manufacturing systems. The concept of a modified reference contour is introduced, which provides a fully modular cross-coupling control (CCC), to facilitate CSM design. First, the unified linear CCC algorithm with proven stability is presented for multi-axis servo-systems. Then, an empirical calibration and sensitivity analysis is conducted such that the optimal control configuration, which achieves the lowest feasible contour error, is obtained for all possible configurations of the servo-system. Despite dramatic differences between the servo-system variants, it is shown experimentally that full CSM is achieved with the same controller for all the variants of the servo-system.