Component Swapping Modularity for Distributed Precision Contouring

Prior works use numerical simulations to verify component swapping modularity (CSM) for various systems. Moreover, current CSM algorithms do not investigate control parameter allocation for a realistic control configuration when the control consists of multiple parts. Thus, this work primarily focuses on presenting and experimentally validating an empirical methodology to allocate and calibrate various parts of the controller to improve CSM in a precision multiaxis servo-system. As a secondary contribution, the concept of the modified reference contour is introduced to simplify control allocation and to improve the modularity of the cross-coupling control (CCC), which is utilized to achieve high-precision contouring. First, the unified linear CCC algorithm is presented for multiaxis servo-systems. Initially, the sensitivity of the contouring algorithm versus the control parameters is studied numerically. Then, empirical calibration and sensitivity analysis are conducted to obtain the optimal set of control parameters. Hence, the lowest feasible contour error is obtained for possible configurations of the servo-system. It is shown that the results of the empirical analysis are consistent with those of the numerical analysis. Despite dramatic differences between the servo-system variants, experimental results show that full CSM is achieved with the same controller for the variants of the servo-system.