Modeling and Control for Giant Magnetostrictive Actuators with Rate-Dependent Hysteresis

The rate-dependent hysteresis in giant magnetostrictive materials is a major impediment to the application of such material in actuators. In this paper, a relevance vector machine (RVM) model is proposed for describing the hysteresis nonlinearity under varying input current. It is possible to construct a unique dynamic model in a given rate range for a rate-dependent hysteresis system using the sinusoidal scanning signals as the training set input signal. Subsequently, a proportional integral derivative (PID) control scheme combined with a feedforward compensation is implemented on a giant magnetostrictive actuator (GMA) for real-time precise trajectory tracking. Simulations and experiments both verify the effectiveness and the practicality of the proposed modeling and control methods.