Experimental comparison of contouring performance and consumed energy between adaptive versus non-adaptive controllers for an industrial machine

Although adaptive control has been widely studied and its effectiveness in control performance has been confirmed in scientific papers, applications to industrial machines are not widespread. This study verifies its effectiveness to not only motion trajectory tracking performance but also energy consumption with an industrial machine testbed. Because adaptive control adjusts its control parameters to ideal values, less energy consumption is expected while maintaining control performance. First, this paper presents a design of discrete-time adaptive control based on one of the authors' previous work. Next, contouring performance and energy consumption are compared to a conventional controller including proportional-derivative control and a robust observer. A typical repetitive circular motion of a machine tool feed drive with/without cutting tasks is employed for experimental comparison under several control system poles.