Reduction of Consumed Energy and Control Input Variance in Machine Tool Feed Drives by Contouring Control

Contouring control has been widely studied to reduce contour error, defined as error components orthogonal to desired contour curves. Its effectiveness has, however, to the best of our knowledge, only been verified through comparative experiments using industrial non-contouring (independent axial) controllers or conventional contouring controllers such as the cross-coupling controller. Because control performance depends largely on controller gain, these comparisons have problems in showing the effectiveness of contouring control, meaning that similar control performance could be attained if non-contouring controller gain were appropriately assigned. This paper presents contouring controller design for biaxial feed drives that reduces controller gain, rather than contour error, better than conventional independent axial controllers. The contouring controller is shown in experiments to effectively reduce control input variance and electricity consumption on average by 4.5%.