Synchronous control of a network-based triple mechanically-coupled ball screws system

This paper presents a single-axis feed-drive that is jointly driven by three mechanically-coupled ball screw/servomotor units based on the SERCOS III network control system. A synchronous control scheme is designed and a system identification method is developed to model the coupled system. The tracking error and the synchronization error among the three servomotor units are used to evaluate the control performance. The experimental results show that the proposed synchronous control can significantly reduce synchronization error but may increase the servo lag.