Control of Time-Varying Lateral Tape Motion in a Linear-Tape-Open Drive via Adaptive Regulation

This extended abstract summarizes a methodology along with the experimental results to adaptively reduce time-varying lateral tape motion (LTM) in a Linear Tape-Open (LTO) drive. For the adaptive regulation, the LTO actuator dynamics is modeled with a Linear Time Invariant (LTI) model and control of time-varying LTM disturbances is done via an adaptable linear feedback controller. Adaptive regulation is done via the direct estimation of a perturbation on the feedback controller. By simultaneously minimizing the variance of the Position Error Signal (PES) and the control output signal, the direct estimation of the controller perturbation is formulated as a weighted estimation problem that is implemented recursively for real-time implementation. The experimental results show a significant reduction of the variance of the PES over different tape cartridges and a constant PES variance during a complete reel-in/out operation of the tape drive.