Control System Development of Grating Ruling Engine Based on MATLAB/Simulink

Abstract

This paper presents the control system development of a diffraction grating ruling engine. The grating ruling engine which consists of a ruling subsystem and a indexing subsystem including a outside stage (coarse stage) and a inside stage (fine stage) and which realize groove densities of 6000 grooves/mm, maximum ruled area of 300 (groove length) × 300 (width) and nanometer level positioning error has been designed. The ultra-precision requirement demands not only precision mechanical structure but also advanced control system, both of whose development take long time. To shorten development period and reduce the costs, concurrent control system development combined with MATLAB/Simulink is implemented. The control software constructs graphic user interface to show the virtual grating ruling engine and provides interface with Simulink module. Various control algorithms, which are written in C language to facilitate future code porting, is verified in Simulink. Finally, single neuron PID control algorithm is adopted. The control software starts Simulink simulation and emulated data which is transferred from Simulink to software is used to control virtual engine to move corresponding. After the completion of simulation, the algorithm is ported into software to control the real ruling engine. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that combined simulation is an effective approach and that the positional accuracy has been readily achieved within 9.2 nm.