Track-Following Controller Design for a Compound Disk Drive Actuator

The use of compound actuators in both magnetic and optical disk files has become a means of achieving increased servo actuator bandwidths. A compound actuator, comprised of a fine actuator mounted «piggyback» on a coarse actuator, positions the read/write transducers above a radial track. This paper describes a design methodology for a discrete-time feedback control system for a compound actuator in which the dynamic interaction between the actuator stages is directly considered