Design principles and implementation of acceleration feedback to improve performance of DC drives

The principles and design methodologies of acceleration feedback and its use to substantially improve the performance of DC servo drives are demonstrated. The impetus is the need to improve the stiffness of drives used in motion control applications where load fluctuations cause unacceptable motion errors. It is demonstrated that the acceleration feedback allows substantially higher overall stiffness without requiring higher bandwidths of the velocity and position loops. It is shown that acceleration feedback acts as an 'active inertia,' which acts to produce the higher stiffness. These underlying principles are developed in a straightforward manner and the performance is demonstrated via both simulation and experiments on two DC drive test systems.>