Design principles and implementation of acceleration feedback to improve performance of DC drives

An attempt is made to demonstrate the principles, design methodologies, and implementation of acceleration feedback to substantially improve the performance of DC servodrives. The impetus behind this work is the need to improve the stiffness of drives used in motion control applications where load fluctuations cause unacceptable motion errors. Such applications dominate the robotics field, as well as many manufacturing processes. To achieve lower amplitudes of load-induced motion errors implies achieving a basic improvement in stiffness. Rather then attempting to improve stiffness by the classical approach of using higher velocity and position state feedback gains, it is demonstrated that acceleration feedback allows substantially higher overall stiffness without requiring higher bandwidths of the velocity and position loops. It is also pointed out that acceleration feedback acts as an active inertia which produces the higher stiffness. The performance via both simulation and experiments on two DC drive test systems is demonstrated.<<ETX>>