Nonlinear synchronous control for H-Type gantry stage used in electric vehicles manufacturing

The H-type gantry stage (HGS) is widely used in electric vehicle manufacturing and other fields. However, resulting from the existence of mechanical coupling, the synchronous control problem of HGS always troubles many engineers. Most synchronization schemes were either engaged in improving each motor's tracking performance or committed to pure motion synchronization only. However, tracking and synchronous performance are interconnected, because of the mechanical coupling. In this paper, a rigid assumed system model of HGS, concerning the effects of mid-beam rotary inertia, mid-beam stiffness, and end-effector movement, is presented. Based on the proposed model, an adaptive robust synchronous control based on a rigid assumed model (ARSCR) is proposed to improve both synchronous and tracking performance of the HGS. From the Lyapunov analysis, the proposed ARSCR can achieve the convergence of synchronous error and tracking error, simultaneously. An HGS driven by dual linear motors is built and used to perform the experimental verification. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.