On-line force ripple identification and compensation in precision positioning of wafer stages

This paper presents the design and implementation of a composite controller to reduce the effect of force ripple in a linear motor wafer stage system. The composite controller consists of two components: 1) a PID feedback controller and 2) an adaptive feedforward compensator. The feedback controller is tuned to achieve good transient response and enhanced robustness of the system. Force ripples are a major source of tracking error in linear motor precision positioning systems. An approximation of the nonlinear force ripple model can be obtained by expressing the ripple as the sum of a sequence of sinusoidal harmonics, multiplied by the motor current. The force ripple is first approximated by on-line adaptive estimation of the unknown coefficients associated with each harmonic, and then compensated with a feedforward term. Experimental results on a prototype single degree of freedom wafer stage are presented to show the performance improvement obtained by the proposed control scheme.