Modeling and compensation of nonlinearities and friction in a micro hard disk drive servo system with nonlinear feedback control

Friction and nonlinearities result in large residual errors and deteriorate the performance of head positioning of hard disk drive (HDD) servo systems and other mechanical servo systems. Thus, it is highly desirable to characterize the behaviors of nonlinearities and friction in the servo systems. This paper presents a fairly comprehensive modeling and compensation of friction and nonlinearities of a typical voice-coil-motor (VCM) actuator used in commercial HDDs, and the design of an HDD servo system using an enhanced nonlinear control technique. Our contributions are two-fold: We will first obtain a complete model of the VCM actuator including friction and nonlinear characteristics through a careful examination of the configuration and structure of the actual system and through a thorough analysis of its physical effects together with its time-domain and frequency-domain responses. We will then proceed to design a servo system for the hard drive using an enhanced composite nonlinear feedback (CNF) control technique with a simple friction and nonlinearity compensation scheme. The enhanced CNF technique has a feature of removing the uncompensated portion of friction and nonlinearities without sacrificing the overall tracking performance. Simulation and experimental results for both the modeling and the servo design show that our approach is very effective and successful. In particular, our experimental results show that the enhanced CNF control has outperformed the conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control in settling time by 76%. We believe that this approach can be adopted to solve other servomechanism problems.