Active disturbance rejection controller for electronic gearbox

Abstract

In this paper, the active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) for the electronic gearboxes (EGB) is proposed to solve the problem of gear deviation caused by the change of cutting force. Firstly, we analyzed the principle of the CNC hobbing process and established the machine tool kinematic model and EGB control precision model. Then, to achieve self-compensation for the system disturbance, the ADRC is utilized. In addition, an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm is introduced to address the issue of the ADRC’s parameters being hard to select. Finally, the EGB is designed using a composite structure and combined with the ADRC. We compare master–slave and composite EGB for experimental verification using a CNC hobbing machine as an example. The proposed composite EGB method is obtained through numerical simulation and experiments to effectively verify the EGB control precision of the CNC hobbing machine. Meanwhile, the tracking precision of each motion axis is improved obviously. The proposed composite EGB method solves the issue of self-compensating disturbances in CNC hobbing machine tools from the controller design. It provides a novel design method that can apply to all kinds of CNC machine tools to deal with disturbance problems.