DEVELOPMENT OF AN INKJET CARRIAGE MOTION CONTROLLER FOR DYNAMIC PRINT MODE CONTROL

Typical inkjet printers print with a variety of user-selectable print modes, where media, cartridge and image processing attributes are statically defined for each print mode. In this paper, we present the development of an inkjet carriage motion control system in which the carriage motion attributes can be dynamically changed depending on the image content. The resulting system enables the development of Dynamic Print Mode Control (DPMC). DPMC achieves optimal trade-off between print quality and print speed by selecting an appropriate printing attributes based on arbitrary segmentations of different image contents. The two-degree-of-freedom (TDOF) controller combines a disturbance observer with a filtered zero-phase error tracking controller (ZPETC) for high tracking performance under uncertain disturbances and model uncertainties. Experimental results show an excellent performance under fixed-point controller implementation.