High Bandwidth Motion Control for Multi-Axis Servohydraulic Mechanisms

A practical motion control method is presented for multiaxis parallel servohydraulic mechanisms in which the payload behaves as a rigid mass. The ability of this method to decouple the control axes is demonstrated. A modal control approach is used – i.e. the modes of vibration of the system are controlled individually. These modes are dependent on the inertial properties of the payload and the compliance of the actuators due to oil compressibility. For each mode, a partial non-linear dynamic inversion is performed in the control loop. To avoid the need to differentiate the position feedback signals, accelerometers are also used, and three-element motion state vectors are estimated using composite filtering. Command feedforward is used to increase the tracking bandwidth, and the closed-loop part of the controller can be conceived as a model-based disturbance observer. Simulation results are presented based on a detailed validated model of a large vibration table used for earthquake simulation. Just three of the six degrees-of-freedom of the table are considered, and the results for horizontal acceleration tracking response are presented, along with the ability of the controller to reject the ‘overturning moment’.