Improved design of VSS controller for a linear belt-driven servomechanism

This paper proposes a new control algorithm for a linear belt-driven servomechanism. The elasticity of the belt and large nonlinear friction along with large variation of parameters limit the applicability of the belt driven servosystems. Design of simple control that can guarantee stable, vibration-free operation for large variation of load is needed to extend application of such a linear stage. The proposed control is based on the application of sliding mode methods combined with Lyapunov design so it guarantees the stability of the system. Due to the restriction of the system motion to specially selected sliding mode manifold the vibration free position tracking is achieved with very good disturbance rejection. Proposed algorithm is simple and practical for an implementation and the tuning procedure of the control parameters is simple. The experiments have shown that the proposed control scheme effectively suppresses vibrations and assures wide closed-loop bandwidth for position tracking control.