Gain-scheduling robust control with guaranteed stability for ball screw drives with uncertain load mass and varying resonant modes

This paper presents a gain-scheduling (GS) robust control strategy using the interpolation approach for ball screw drives while guaranteeing the system stability in the operating range. A set of linear-time-invariant (LTI) robust controllers is designed at selected table positions for the robustness against the uncertain load mass and the structural vibration suppression at those positions. By interpolating the LTI robust controllers, a GS robust controller is obtained to deal with the dynamic variations caused by the table motion. The closed-loop stability under the proposed GS robust controller is verified with the parameter-dependent Lyapunov function, which avoids tedious simulations to check the reliability of interpolating GS controllers before practical operations. The method presented in this paper enables the GS controller to consider the unmeasurable load mass in ball screw drives and simplifies the application complexity. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GS robust controller significantly improves the tracking performance and the vibration suppression, in comparison to LTI controllers and GS controllers.