Adaptive Sliding Mode Control With Feedforward Compensator for Energy-Efficient and High-Speed Precision Motion of Feed Drive Systems

Industrial feed drive systems, particularly ball-screw and lead-screw feed drives are among the dominating components in production and manufacturing industries. They operate around the clock and at high speeds for coping with the growing production demands. Adversely, high-speed motions cause mechanical vibration, high-energy consumption, and poor tracking performance. Thus, over the years, the research community has invested in precision control and energy saving for these systems. Although there are many control strategies in the literature, such as sliding mode and model predictive controls, further research is necessary for performance enhancement. This study focuses on both high-speed precision control and energy-saving control for feed drive systems. An adaptive nonlinear sliding mode controller with a feedforward compensator for plant uncertainties is designed and its stability is confirmed through the Lyapunov stability theories. For performance evaluation, simulations and experiments are conducted and results are compared with those of an adaptive nonlinear sliding model controller. Results revealed that, based on the proposed controller, the tracking errors of feed drive systems can be reduced by about 33% on average and the maximum tracking error by about 64% on average. In addition, the energy consumption can be reduced by about 2% under similar tracking performance.