Robust dynamic modeling and control of dual-stage actuators

In a hard disk drive with a dual-stage actuator the standard rotary actuation of the voice coil motor (VCM) is combined with an additional micro- or milli-actuation to accomplish high-bandwidth and highly accurate track following. For extremely high density recording, the servo control algorithm designed for a specific dual-stage actuator needs to maintain high performance track following in lieu of external disturbances and uncertainties in the dynamic response induced by product manufacturing tolerances. Essential in the robust design of a servo control algorithm is to bound these uncertainties and design a robust track following servos accordingly. In this paper, we present an experiment based methodology to characterize and bound the uncertainties in the dynamic response of a dual-stage actuator in the form of an uncertainty model. Subsequently, the uncertainty model is used for the analysis and synthesis of a robust dual-stage servo controller that is able to optimize position error variance in the presence of uncertainty information.