A synchronized coupled position control architecture for a 3P¯E positioning stage parallel manipulator (PSPM)

• Published in: Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering 2023, Vol.45 (7)
• Main Authors: Jana, Santanu, Saha, Suman, Dutta, Samik, Mahapatra, Abhijit, Akhtar, Mohd. Afroz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Actuation; Algorithms; Compensation; Contours; Controllers; Electric motors; Engineering; Kinematics; Manipulators; Mechanical Engineering; Pallets; Position errors; Robustness (mathematics); Stability analysis; Stability criteria; Synchronism; Technical Paper; Tracking control
• ISSN: 1678-5878; 1806-3691
• DOI: 10.1007/s40430-023-04264-0

In this paper, a synchronized coupled position control architecture is proposed for a three-axis position enabled (3 P ¯ E ) positioning stage parallel manipulator (PSPM) consisting of three kinematic sub-chains actuated through a linear motor. The study started with the kinematic analysis of the structural frame of a parallel manipulator to establish the relation between the task frame and base frame in terms of three-motor actuation axes and the positioning stage of the task frame. The tracking control of the three-motor actuation is achieved first through the conventional cascading control technique. However, in the task frame, the tracking of coordinates requires not only tracking of individual motor actuation but demands synchronization between them. The merit of the proposed synchronized coupled position control architecture is mainly threefold. First, a feedforward compensation is implemented for pre-compensation of position errors of different axes before synchronization; hence, the scheme does not require variable synchronizing gains. Second, a contour error algorithm has been formulated for 3-D tracking at the task frame level thereby overcoming the requirement of the dynamic parameters selection. Third, based on the contour error generated from the contour error algorithm, the synchronization among the three-motor actuation for the overall contour tracking has been established using a synchronized coupled (SC) controller. The tracking controller is evaluated in the presence of noise for robustness analysis, while, a sinusoidal-based desired contour signal is utilized for evaluating the SC controller in achieving desired synchronization for overall contour tracking. The stability analysis of the overall positioning control architecture is established based on the Jury’s stability criteria and bounded-input-bounded-output (BIBO) stability concept. The effectiveness of the proposed control architecture is finally validated against some well-known contour signals using numerical results obtained from the MATLAB/Simulink environment.