Industrial Motion Control
In this tutorial the students will be able to understand and refresh the main aspects in the application of Motion Control on Linear Motor driven systems. From the broad field of Control Theory those fields most often used in Industry will be introduced, explained and applied. This focus will help engineers from different backgrounds to be familiar with the terminology and meaning of the most common theories.
The first part of the tutorial, to be presented by Prof. David Trumper, will introduce the basics of designing feedback controllers. Design focusing on the need to meet future specifications in the presence of disturbing effects will be introduced. The common language based on the displaying Transfer Functions in the Bode diagram will be used and the different basics of stability will be explained.
The second part of the tutorial will be presented by Dr. Steve Ludwick from Aerotech. He will focus on the application of Feed-Forward control for Linear Motion Systems. Given a suitable model of the system gives the theoretical opportunity to drive the system along desired trajectories without any feedback control. In practice the models will show some deviations and thus the combination of Feed-Forward and Feedback are needed. Steve will explain how to obtain the right models and will show what the limitations in this approach are. Possible solutions in this respect are methods that learn from actual motions and the observed errors to improve the quality of the model. A short introduction of the concepts of Repetitive Control and Iterative Learning Control will be given.
In the last part Prof. Jan van Eijk will explain how the System Concept and its mechanical design may determine limitations on the performance of the controlled system. Dynamics in the system may lead to instability of the feedback controlled system when the control power is increased. The same dynamics will also influence the models used for the Feed-Forward control. For System Engineers, Mechanical designers and Control Specialist these influences are major issues when the required speed and accuracy of systems are increasing.
During the tutorial live demonstrations are planned on an industrial set-up to illustrate the different aspects and the way in which industrial developers can do experiments on real systems.
About the tutors: