Because of their lower cost, higher speed, and longer travel, belt-driven systems are quite desirable over screw-driven systems. However, belt-driven systems are inherently difficult to control due to belt flexibility, stretch, backlash, and other nonlinearities. This thesis presents servo control algorithms and the designing method of controller appliable to belt-driven systems. To design the servo controller, a simple and effective modeling method for belt-driven systems is proposed and PID controller gains are tuned by modified Ziegler-Nichols tuning method using this modeling information.
The test results of the actual belt-driven system have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed servo controller.
