A switching gain scheduled approach for wafer transfer robots and its experimental evaluations

This paper considers the control of wafer transfer robots. The robots are used for transferring silicon wafers in semiconductors manufacturing. In order to advance the productivity of semiconductors, the control systems for wafer transfer robots are required to achieve high-speed transfer and highly accurate positioning. However, it is difficult to design the controllers which achieve such performance because the robots have nonlinear properties and physical constraints. In this paper, we present a simple gain scheduled control design method for robots. The gain scheduling is known as an effective control technique for nonlinear systems. Furthermore, in order to obtain good performance, we apply switching control technique. We evaluate the effectiveness through simulations and experiments