Frequency domain based friction compensation - Industrial application to transmission electron microscopes -

Friction is a performance limiting factor in many industrial motion systems. Correct compensation or control of friction and other nonlinearities is generally difficult. Apart from the complex nature of friction, compensation of even the most basic type of friction, Coulomb friction, is non trivial. Most available tuning methods rely on time domain data and are often unable to distinguish between nonlinear effects of friction and that of for example linear viscous damping. Furthermore, the sensitivity of time domain data to the influence of friction is too low for correct tuning in many of the high precision motion applications currently used in industry. In this paper a frequency domain method is introduced that allows fast and high accuracy tuning of controller parameters when the closed loop system is subject to nonlinear influences. This methodology is applied to optimally compensate friction in a high precision motion stage of a transmission electron microscope. Theoretical and experimental results are presented and related to time domain performance to illustrate the advantage of frequency domain tuning over time domain tuning.