High-precision control of piezoelectric nanopositioning stages using hysteresis compensator and disturbance observer

This paper proposes a novel high-performance control scheme with hysteresis compensator and disturbance observer for high-precision motion control of a nanopositioning stage driven by a piezoelectric stack actuator (PSA). In the developed control scheme, a real-time inverse hysteresis compensator (IHC) with the modified Prandtl-Ishlinskii model is firstly designed to compensate for the asymmetric hysteresis nonlinearity of the PSA. Due to the imperfect compensation, the dynamics behaviors of the PSA-actuated stage with the IHC can be treated as a linear dynamic system plus a lumped disturbance term. Owing to the unknown nature of this lumped disturbance term, a disturbance observer (DOB) is used as a means for disturbance rejection. With the DOB, a tracking controller is finally designed and implemented to stabilize the position error. To verify the proposed control scheme, a real-time experimental platform with a PSA-actuated nanopositioning stage is built, and extensive experimental tests are performed. The comparative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and improved performance of the developed control approach in terms of the maximum-value errors, root-mean-square-value errors and hysteresis compensation.