High-bandwidth control of a piezoelectric nanopositioning stage in the presence of plant uncertainties

Inversion-based feedforward techniques have been known to deliver accurate tracking performance in the absence of plant parameter uncertainties. Piezoelectric stack actuated nanopositioning platforms are prone to variations in their system parameters such as resonance frequencies, due to changes in operating conditions like ambient temperature, humidity and loading. They also suffer from nonlinear effects of hysteresis, an inherent property of a piezoelectric actuator; charge actuation is applied to reduce the effects of hysteresis. In this work, we propose and test a technique that integrates a suitable feedback controller to reduce the effects of parameter uncertainties with the inversion-based feedforward technique. It is shown experimentally that the combination of damping, feedforward and charge actuation increases the tracking bandwidth of the platform from 310 to 1320 Hz.