Dual-axis control of flexure-based motion system for optical fibre transceiver assembly using fixed-order controller

High-frequency resonant modes appearing in the flexure-based motion systems are the key factors that limit the motion/positioning performance. This paper presents an approach to design the fixed-order (low-order) controller for the flexure-based motion system, which is used for industrial optical fibre transceiver alignment and assembly. The uniqueness of the proposed algorithm is that one single controller can simultaneously stabilize the uncertain high-frequency resonant modes for both x and y-axis motion. Especially, the resulted controller can significantly enhance the tracking and disturbance rejection ability in low frequency. The novelty of the proposed method is mainly twofold. First, the finite-frequency specifications are introduced to robust control of the polytopic systems. As the entire frequency specifications have the trend to place the dominant poles towards the central polynomial, the finite-frequency specifications largely relax the conservatism for the performance optimization. Second, a new and practical method is proposed to choose the central polynomial by designing a nominal controller, where two different central polynomials are utilized for x and y-axis separately for the practical applications, so that the stability and performance are guaranteed but the conservatism is reduced. Experiments are evaluated on the 2 DOF flexure-based motion system, and the results show that the tracking error using designed fixed-order controller has a more than 50% reduction compared with the same-order notch filter based nominal controller, with respect to both the sinusoidal and triangular references. (C) 2018 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.