Neural Network Learning Adaptive Robust Control of an Industrial Linear Motor-Driven Stage With Disturbance Rejection Ability

In this paper, a neural network learning adaptive robust controller (NNLARC) is synthesized for an industrial linear motor stage to achieve good tracking performance and excellent disturbance rejection ability. The NNLARC scheme contains parametric adaption part, robust feedback part, and radial basis function (RBF) neural network (NN) part in a parallel structure. The adaptive part and the robust part are designed based on the system dynamics to meet the challenge of parametric variations and uncertain random disturbances. It must be noted that in actual industrial machining situations, precision motion equipment is always disturbed by unknown factors, which usually cannot be described by mathematical models but affect the tracking accuracy significantly. Therefore, the RBF NN part is employed to further approximate and compensate the complicated disturbances with high reconstructing accuracy and fast training rate. The stability of the proposed NNLARC strategy is analyzed and proved through the Lyapunov theorem. Comparative experiments under various external disturbances such as completely unknown disturbance added by polyfoam are conducted on an industrial linear motor stage. The experimental results consistently validate that the proposed NNLARC control strategy can excellently meet the challenge of complicated disturbance in practical applications. The proposed scheme also provides a guidance for control strategy synthesis with both good tracking performance and disturbance rejection.