Model predictive control for reference tracking on an industrial machine tool servo drive

Abstract

The benefits of model predictive control (MPC) have been well established; however its application to reference tracking on digital servo drives (DSDs), which typically have very fast update rates, is limited by the computational power of present-day processors. This paper presents a novel MPC formulation, which provides a mechanism to trade-off online computation effort with tracking performance, while maintaining stability. This is achieved by introducing a trajectory horizon, which is distinct from the prediction and control horizons typically encountered in MPC formulations. It is shown that increasing the trajectory horizon inherently leads to improved tracking; however larger horizon l..