Active Tape Steering Control System

Abstract

Lateral tape motion (LTM) in tape drives hinders accurate servo head positioning and can cause damage to the tape. It is one of the major obstacles to developing high density, high performance tape drives. This paper presents the development an active tape steering system to reduce LTM. A robust controller is designed using the Robust Bode (RBode) Plot, which translates an robust performance criterion into boundary functions on the open-loop Bode plot of a compensated SISO system. With the RBode plot robust controllers can be directly synthesized with classical loop shaping.