Robust high-bandwidth control of nano-positioning stages with Kalman filter based extended state observer and H∞ control.

The achievable performance of the piezo-actuated nano-positioning stages is severely limited by the intrinsic nonlinearities of the actuators, the lightly damped resonant mode of the flexure-hinge mechanism, and the external disturbances. To overcome all these limitations, this paper presents a novel robust dual-loop control scheme with a Kalman filter-based extended state observer and H∞ control for nano-positioning stages to implement high-bandwidth tracking operations. In this scheme, the extended state observer (ESO) is first developed and assisted by the identified system model to estimate both the system states and total disturbances, where the estimated disturbance is compensated by the direct feedback. In particular, to further improve the estimation performance, the Kalman filter is thus incorporated into the ESO to optimize the observer gain. Then, the state-feedback-based inner-loop controller is designed via the pole-placement method to damp the resonant mode of nano-positioning stages. Finally, a H∞ robust controller is adopted in the outer-loop to eliminate the influence resulting from the external disturbances, nonlinearities, and unmodeled dynamics on tracking operations. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, comparative experiments are conducted on a piezo-actuated nano-positioning stage. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed control scheme improves the control bandwidth of the system from 3.6 kHz (the stand-alone H∞ controller) to 5.52 kHz, which is 93.5% of the first resonant frequency of the original system. Moreover, it shows excellent robustness against the variation of system dynamics due to the change in the mounted mass and the external disturbances.