Exploring the use of deep learning in task-flexible ILC*

Growing demands in today’s industry results in increasingly stringent performance and throughput specifications. For accurate positioning of high-precision motion systems, feedforward control plays a crucial role. Nonetheless, conventional model-based feedforward approaches are no longer sufficient to satisfy the challenging performance requirements. An attractive method for systems with repetitive motion tasks is iterative learning control (ILC) due to its superior performance. However, for systems with non-repetitive motion tasks, ILC is generally not applicable, despite of some recent promising advances. In this paper, we aim to explore the use of deep learning to address the task flexibility constraint of ILC. For this purpose, a novel Task Analogy based Imitation Learning (TAIL)-ILC approach is developed. To benchmark the performance of the proposed approach, a simulation study is presented which compares the TAIL-ILC to classical model-based feedforward strategies and existing learning-based approaches, such as neural network based feedforward learning.