A Rate-Difference Disturbance Observer Control for a Timing-Belt Servo System

The belt-drive control enables the mechanical system to gain the advantages of lightweight, vibration absorption, and high torque, while it brings strong nonlinear disturbances due to friction, backlash, and flexibility. Therefore an improved disturbance observer (DOB) control method based on the dual-rate loop structure is proposed in this article to suppress these disturbances. Only a linear low-frequency device model is required, which indicates that this method avoids the dependence on accurate identification of the nonlinear uncertain systems. The rate information on the motor-side is replaced with the input signal of inner loop due to the high bandwidth of inner motor loop, which greatly simplifies the design of the control system. In the case of insufficient system bandwidth, the proposed method integrates the favorable information of the load-side and the motor-side under the DOB framework. And the speed-commutation spikes and chatters resulting from disturbances on the flexible transmission chain can be more effectively suppressed by the proposed control structure compared with the conventional methods.