A novel damping scheduling scheme for proximate time optimal servomechanisms in hard disk drives

The proximate time-optimal servomechanism (PTOS) is widely used in hard disk drives because of its simplicity and good performance. There have been many studies to improve PTOSs, though they are complex or need a time-consuming tuning process. Here, we propose a novel damping scheduling PTOS (DSPTOS) for hard disk drives. The proposed algorithm keeps the closed-loop damping coefficient at a predetermined value. Compared to the original PTOS, smaller damping in deceleration will boost the rising speed, and larger damping in the settling phase reduces the overshoot and residual vibrations. Moreover, the DSPTOS maintains the simplicity of the PTOS by introducing just a predetermined damping coefficient. We applied the proposed DSPTOS algorithm to a voice coil motor in a hard disk drive. Through simulations and real-time experiments, we verified the effectiveness of the DSPTOS. In particular, with respect to long stroke seeks, the DSPTOS performs better than the PTOS.