A proximate-time-optimal-control design and its application to a hard disk drive dual-stage actuator system

We propose a compensator-based strategy for design of a track-seeking and track-following control system for a dual-stage servo actuator in hard disk drives. A well-known decoupling structure is employed to disconnect the control of the primary voice coil motor (VCM) actuator from the loop for a secondary high-bandwidth actuator. The compensator is placed in the secondary loop and suitably combined with a saturation nonlinearity in order to obtain actuator signal boundedness. The design procedure consists of four steps: 1) design of an established nonlinear seek-settle-track following controller for the VCM; 2) design of a linear track following controller for the secondary actuator; 3) observer design; and 4) design of a compensator to retain global stability and to improve performance. The proposed control system improves performance of both long-span seeking (proximate-time-optimal controller) and short-span seeking. In addition, it achieves high-bandwidth track following performance. The experimental results show good track-following performance, and short-span/long-span-seeking performance with fast settling time. The overshoot during track seeking can be made negligible for a suitably tuned VCM-actuator control loop.