Design of Linear DC Motor Two-degree-of-freedom Positioning System using Model Reference type Sliding Mode Controller

Abstract

One of fundamental problems in the factory automation is how to obtain linear motion. Linear motors produce directly the linear motion force without a motion-transform mechanism. Linear d.c. motors (LDMs) have excellent performance and controllability. However, the dynamics of small-sized LDMs is adversely affected by the dead-band due to the friction between brushes and commutators.
In this paper, it is described that the design of the two-degree-of-freedom positioning system with a LDM using model reference type sliding mode controller (SMC). The proposed positioning system consists of a fixed gain feedforward controller and a SMC used as a feedback controller. The objective of the SMC is to repress the influence of nonlinear characteristics (the dead-band and parameter variations etc.). The tracking performance can be improved as the fixed gain feedforward controller makes a dynamic inverse system in the feedforward path. The effectiveness of the proposed system for improvement of the tracking performance is demonstrated by experimental results.