Lightweight design and encoderless control of a miniature direct drive linear delta robot

This paper presents the design, integration and experimental validation of a miniature light-weight delta robot targeted to be used for a variety of applications including the pick-place operations, high speed precise positioning and haptic implementations. The improvements brought by the new design contain; the use of a novel light-weight joint type replacing the conventional and heavy bearing structures and realization of encoderless position measurement algorithm based on hall effect sensor outputs of direct drive linear motors. The description of mechanical, electrical and software based improvements are followed by the derivation of a sliding mode controller to handle tracking of planar closed curves represented by elliptic fourier descriptors (EFDs). The new robot is tested in experiments and the validity of the improvements are verified for practical implementation

Stabilization Control of the Differential Mobile Robot Using Lyapunov Function and Extended Kalman Filter

This paper presents the design of a control model to navigate the differential mobile robot to reach the desired destination from an arbitrary initial pose. The designed model is divided into two stages: the state estimation and the stabilization control. In the state estimation, an extended Kalman filter is employed to optimally combine the information from the system dynamics and measurements. Two Lyapunov functions are constructed that allow a hybrid feedback control law to execute the robot movements. The asymptotical stability and robustness of the closed loop system are assured. Simulations and experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1611.07112, arXiv:1611.0711

Development of a robust nonlinear pitch angle controller for a redesigned 5MW wind turbine blade tip

Power in wind turbines are traditionally controlled by varying the pitch angle at high wind speeds in region 3 of the wind turbine operation. The pitch angles controllers are normally driven by electrical or hydraulic actuators. The motivation of this research is to design and implement a pitch angle control strategy at the outer section of the blade via a separated pitch control at blade tip (SePCaT). A pneumatic actuator is implemented to drive the pitch angle control mechanism by incorporating pneumatic actuated muscles (PAM) due to its high power/mass ratio, high specific work, and good contraction ratio while maintaining low weight at the tip of the blade. A sliding mode controller (SMC) is modeled and implemented on a redesigned 5MW wind turbine numerically. The hypothesis is that the SePCaT control strategy is effective and satisfactory pitch angle trajectory tracking is achievable. The method is adopted, the system is modeled, and the response was observed by subjecting the model dynamics to desired pitch angle trajectories. Initially comparative controller response with respect to desired trajectory revealed satisfactory pitch angle tracking but further investigation revealed chattering characteristics which was minimized by incorporating a saturation function. SePCaT offers an effective pitch angle control strategy which is smaller, lighter, reliable and efficient

High performance disturbance observer based control system design for permanent magnet synchronous AC machine applications

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonAn electrical machine is one of the main workforces in different industries and serves them in various applications. Machine drive control design involves many technical issues for efficient and robust exploitation. Over several decades, Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) is getting preferred for industrial applications over its counterpart Squirrel Cage Induction Motor (SCIM) drive, because of their higher efficiency, power density, and higher torque to inertia ratio. In the prospective that PMSM drives are considered the drives of the future, there are still technical challenges and issues related to PMSM control. Many studies have been devoted to PMSM control in the past, but there are still some open research areas that bring worldwide researchers’ interests back to PMSM drive control. One of the approaches that may facilitate better performance, higher efficiency, and robust and reliable work of the control system is the disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) with linear and nonlinear output feedback control for PM synchronous machine applications. DOBC is adopted due to its ability to reject external and internal disturbances with improving tracking performance in the variable speed wind energy conversion system (WECS) to maximize power extraction. The high order disturbance observer (HODO) is utilized to estimate the aerodynamic torque-based wind speed without the use of a traditional anemometer, which reduces the overall cost and improves the reliability of the whole system. Also, this method has been designed to improve the angular shaft speed tracking of the PMSM system under load torque disturbance and speed variations. The model-based linear and nonlinear feedback control are used in the proposed control systems. The sliding mode control (SMC) with switching output feedback control law and integral SMC with linear feedback and state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) based approaches have been designed for the systems. The SDRE control accounts for the nonlinear multivariable structure of the WECS and is approximated with Taylor series expansion terms. The chattering inherited from SMC is eliminated by the continuous approximation technique. The sliding mode is guaranteed by eliminating the reaching mode in the proposed integral SMC. The model-free cascaded linear feedback control system based on the proportional-integral (PI) controllers use a back-calculation algorithm anti-windup scheme. The proposed speed controllers are synthesized with HODO to compensate for the external disturbance, model uncertainty, noise, and modelling errors. Moreover, servomechanism-based SDRE control, a near-optimal control system is designed to suppress the model uncertainty and noise without the use of disturbance observers. The proposed control systems for PMSM speed regulation have demonstrated a significant improvement in the angular shaft speed-tracking performance at the transients. Their performances have been tested under speed, load torque variations, and model uncertainty. For example, HODO-based SMC with switching output feedback control law (SOFCL) has demonstrated improvement by more than 78% than the PI-PI control system of the PMSM. The performance of the HODOs-based Integral SMC with SDRE nonlinear feedback is improved by 80.5% under external disturbance, model uncertainty, and noise than Integral SMC with linear feedback in the WECS. The HODO-based SDRE control with servomechanism has shown an 80.2% improvement of mean absolute percentage error under disturbances than Integral SMC with linear feedback in the WECS. The PMSM speed tracking performance of the proposed HODO-based discrete-time PI-PI control system with back-calculation algorithm anti-windup scheme is improved by 87.29% and 90.2% in the speed commands and load torque disturbance variations scenarios respectively. The simulations for testing the proposed control system of the PMSM system and WECS have been implemented in Matlab/Simulink environment. The PMSM speed control experimental results have been obtained with Lucas-Nuelle DSP-based rapid control prototyping kit.Center for International Program “Bolashak” of the Ministry of Education and Science Republic of Kazakhsta

A Nonlinear Sliding Mode Controller for IPMSM Drives with an Adaptive Gain Tuning Rule

This paper presents a nonlinear sliding mode control (SMC) scheme with a variable damping ratio for interior permanent magnet synchronous motors (IPMSMs). First, a nonlinear sliding surface whose parameters change continuously with time is designed. Actually, the proposed SMC has the ability to reduce the settling time without an overshoot by giving a low damping ratio at the initial time and a high damping ratio as the output reaches the desired setpoint. At the same time, it enables a fast convergence in finite time and eliminates the singularity problem with the upper bound of an uncertain term, which cannot be measured in practice, by using a simple adaptation law. To improve the efficiency of a system in the constant torque region, the control system incorporates the maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) algorithm. The stability of the nonlinear sliding surface is guaranteed by Lyapunov stability theory. Moreover, a simple sliding mode observer is used to estimate the load torque and system uncertainties. The effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear SMC scheme is verified using comparative experimental results of the linear SMC scheme when the speed reference and load torque change under system uncertainties. From these experimental results, the proposed nonlinear SMC method reveals a faster transient response, smaller steady-state speed error, and less sensitivity to system uncertainties than the linear SMC metho

Automatic controls and regulators: A compilation

Devices, methods, and techniques for control and regulation of the mechanical/physical functions involved in implementing the space program are discussed. Section one deals with automatic controls considered to be, essentially, start-stop operations or those holding the activity in a desired constraint. Devices that may be used to regulate activities within desired ranges or subject them to predetermined changes are dealt with in section two

A Nonlinear Sliding Mode Controller for IPMSM Drives with an Adaptive Gain Tuning Rule

This paper presents a nonlinear sliding mode control (SMC) scheme with a variable damping ratio for interior permanent magnet synchronous motors (IPMSMs). First, a nonlinear sliding surface whose parameters change continuously with time is designed. Actually, the proposed SMC has the ability to reduce the settling time without an overshoot by giving a low damping ratio at the initial time and a high damping ratio as the output reaches the desired setpoint. At the same time, it enables a fast convergence in finite time and eliminates the singularity problem with the upper bound of an uncertain term, which cannot be measured in practice, by using a simple adaptation law. To improve the efficiency of a system in the constant torque region, the control system incorporates the maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) algorithm. The stability of the nonlinear sliding surface is guaranteed by Lyapunov stability theory. Moreover, a simple sliding mode observer is used to estimate the load torque and system uncertainties. The effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear SMC scheme is verified using comparative experimental results of the linear SMC scheme when the speed reference and load torque change under system uncertainties. From these experimental results, the proposed nonlinear SMC method reveals a faster transient response, smaller steady-state speed error, and less sensitivity to system uncertainties than the linear SMC metho

Fuzzy Logic Control of Switched Reluctance Motor Drives

In this chapter, the electromechanical behavior of switched reluctance motor (SRM) is first modeled by analyzing the related nonlinear differential equations. In the model, the estimation of rotor speed is also considered. After modeling, the effects of torque ripple, radial force, and acoustic noise are investigated. As we know, torque ripple and acoustic noise are two of the main disadvantages of a switched reluctance motor. Thus, a fuzzy logic current compensator is proposed both for reducing the peak of radial force and for decreasing acoustic noise effects. In the parts that torque reduces, the fuzzy logic current compensator injects additional current for each phase current to overcome the torque ripple. Also, the fuzzy logic current compensator reduces speed estimation error. The speed estimation is carried out using a hybrid sliding mode observer which estimates the rotor position and speed for a wide speed range. These new approaches have been simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK for a nonlinear model of switched reluctance motor. The simulation results indicate that proposed methods decrease the maximum radial force and the torque ripple while the maximum torque is preserved. Also, these results show that proposed methods will estimate the rotor position and speed with high precision for all speeds from near zero speeds up to rated speed. These procedures have the advantages of simple implementation on the every switched reluctance motor drive without extra hardware, low cost, high reliability, low vibration, and excellent performance at long term