Synchronised servomechanisms-the scalar-field approach

There is a current trend in manufacturing industry towards the improvement of the flexibility and productivity of machinery. A popular way of achieving these improvements is to remove some or all of the mechanical couplings (gears and cams, for example) that are usually used to synchronise the various parts of the machine. Each part of the machine is instead driven by a servomotor, and the servomotors are controlled in such a way as to emulate the synchronisation functions of the mechanisms they replace. The control techniques that are usually used in these applications, however, only emulate real mechanisms in certain respects. The paper describes a control scheme which causes servomotors to behave in a coupled manner much more akin to that of a real mechanism