Robust adaptive motion tracking of piezoelectric actuated stages using online neural-network-based sliding mode control

Robust and precise motion tracking for micro-electro-mechanical systems in the presence of inherent nonlinearity and external disturbance is of great importance in many applications. Due to high sensitivity to environmental variations, the entire model or some parameters of the system tend to change unexpectedly. Existing offline nonlinearity models are computationally intensive and may be not suitable under system perturbations. In this work, for a class of piezoelectric actuated (PEA) system, a new online neural-network-based sliding mode control (OLNN-SMC) scheme is developed to obtain robust adaptive precision motions. The nonlinearity of the PEA system is identified online and compensated using singularity-free neural networks (NNs). To alleviate the residual NN approximation errors and meanwhile maintain robust stability under external disturbance, a feedback sliding-mode is synthesized into the control law. Considering unknown and varying disturbances, an adaptive mechanism is designed to achieve robust adaptive motion tracking. The controller is implemented and evaluated through experiments on a PEA platform. Results show that the proposed OLNN-SMC is superior to existing proportional-integral-derivative control with disturbance observer (PID+DOB) and adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) in terms of sinusoidal tracking and disturbance rejection. In particular, the root-mean-square (RMS) errors for sinusoidal tracking at 0.1–10 Hz using the proposed OLNN-SMC are reduced by 83.5% compared with the cases using PID+DOB or ASMC.