Control Co-design of Actively Controlled Lightweight Structures for High-acceleration Precision Motion Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nested co-design framework for lightweight precision motion stages that optimizes control bandwidth and robustness, enabling significant weight reduction and performance improvements in manufacturing systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated hardware and control co-design method explicitly considering physical limits and robustness, validated through case studies and simulations.

Findings

42% weight reduction achieved

28% control bandwidth improvement

Effective in both lumped-parameter and finite-element models

Abstract

Precision motion stages are an essential part of a wide range of manufacturing equipment, and their motion performance are critical to the quality and throughput of the systems. The drastically increasing demand for higher manufacturing throughput in various processes necessities the development of next-generation motion systems with reduced moving weight and high control bandwidth. However, the reduction of moving stage's weight can lower the stage's structural resonance frequencies, making the hardware dynamics and controller design problem strongly coupled. Aiming at this challenge, this paper proposes a new formulation of nested hardware and control co-design framework for precision motion stages. The proposed framework explicitly optimizes the closed-loop control bandwidth with guaranteed robustness, and explicitly considers the limits in the physical system. Two case studies, including a motivating example using lumped-parameter mechanical system and a finite-element-simulated lightweight motion stage, are being used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed nested CCD framework. Simulation results show that the proposed nested CCD framework has 42\% of weight reduction and 28\% bandwidth improvement compared with a sequential design baseline, which demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed approach.