Optimal Active Damping Performance in Presence of Disturbance and Electronic Noise Sources

Abstract

Vibration attenuation in lightly damped blade-like systems such as cantilevers or end-effectors of robot manipulators can be dampened using Active Vibration Control (AVC). Piezoelectric patches in a collocated setup measure and control the bending modes of such a cantilever system using Positive Position Feedback (PPF). Tuning methods for PPF are based on optimisations for maximum disturbance rejection and disregard the presence of electronic noise. However, because electronic noise is amplified by controllers with high gains, it can become a significant error source in the system. In this paper, the effect of noise amplification is investigated for blade-like AVC systems. It is shown that there is a trade-off in the total dynamic error between vibration attenuation and noise amplification. An optimisation of this trade-off is proposed, which is performed on an industrial example of a blade-like system and validated experimentally. The optimisation shows clear improvement over traditional tuning methods that disregard the presence and effect of noise.