Sliding mode control (SMC) has been widely investigated in recent years. In this paper, a class of secondorder SMC is proposed and used to achieve good tracking performance in servo systems. SMC has good robustness to the disturbances, but conventional SMC uses a sign function to drive the error on the sliding surface, which could generate chattering effect. In order to avoid this problem, our improved SMC uses the integral of the sign function. Coupled with an exponential reaching law, the new SMC can better suppress torque disturbances and chatter. This paper first gives the derivation of the new SMC. Simulation and experimental results are then carried out to demonstrate its tracking performance and robustness against torque disturbance and chatter.
A layered modeling method is proposed to resolve the problems resulting from the complexity of the error model of a multi-axis motion control system. In this model, a low level layer can be used as a virtual axis by the high level layer. The first advantage of this model is that the complex error model of a four-axis motion control system can be divided into several simple layers and each layer has different coupling strength to match the real control system. The second advantage lies in the fact that the controller in each layer can be designed specifically for a certain purpose. In this research, a three-layered cross coupling scheme in a four-axis motion control system is proposed to compensate the contouring error of the motion control system. Simulation results show that the maximum contouring error is reduced from 0.208 mm to 0.022 mm and the integration of absolute error is reduced from 0.108 mm to 0.015 mm, which are respectively better than 0.027 mm and 0.037 mm by the traditional method. And in the bottom layer the proposed method also has remarkable ability to achieve high contouring accuracy.
