Data-Driven Recursive Least Squares Estimation for Model Predictive Current Control of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors

The performance of model predictive controllers (MPC) strongly depends on the quality of their models. In the field of electric drive control, white-box (WB) modeling approaches derived from first-order physical principles are most common. This procedure typically does not cover parasitic effects and often comes with parameter deviations. These issues are particularly crucial in the domain of self-commissioning drives where a hand-tailored, accurate WB plant model is not available. In order to compensate for such modeling errors and, consequently, to improve the control performance during transients and steady state, this article proposes a data-driven, real-time capable recursive least squares estimation method for the current control of a permanent magnet synchronous motor. Following this machine learning approach, the effect of the flux linkage and voltage harmonics due to the winding scheme can also be taken into account through suitable feature engineering. Moreover, a compensating scheme for the interlocking time of the inverter is proposed. The resulting algorithm is investigated using the well-known finite-control-set MPC (FCS-MPC) in the rotor-oriented coordinate system. The extensive experimental results show the superior performance of the presented scheme compared to a FCS-MPC-based on a state-of-the-art WB motor model using look-up tables for addressing (cross-)saturation.