What does learning control have to offer for your machine? A lot! : We will demonstrate it on industrial printers

Improvements in motion control are a key step towards meeting tightening requirements on throughput and accuracy in future industrial machines. Typically, a combination of traditional feedback and feedforward controllers is employed, which remain fixed throughout the life-cycle of the system. Learning control enables a significant performance increase over feedback and feedforward control by learning from past data, to anticipate and compensate for repeating components of the error. These disturbances include known setpoint signals and unknown disturbances, such as friction and hysteresis. Although important progress has been made in theory and design of learning controllers, its full potential for industrial mechatronic applications is largely unexploited [1]. This is partly due to several former shortcomings of learning control. The aim of this work is to provide a concise overview of recent advances in learning control that are particularly tailored towards successful industrial implementation, and reveal to the interested reader what learning control has to offer for his/her particular problem at hand.