Improving velocity feedback for position control by using a discrete-time sliding mode filtering with adaptive windowing

In position control of mechatronic devices, velocity feedback is important for injecting additional damping to avoid low-frequency fluctuation around desired trajectories. In practice, velocity signal is often obtained by finite difference of position signal from an optical encoder. However, such a numerical differentiation produces high-frequency noise by magnifying quantization error contained in the position signal. As a result, the controller may produce high-frequency vibration. This paper presents a new noise-reduction discrete-time filter based on sliding mode and adaptive windowing. The presented filter is an improved version of a sliding mode filter by Jin et al. (2012), with including adaptive windowing of which the window size is determined in a similar way to that of a discrete-time adaptive windowing differentiator by Janabi-Sharifi et al. (2000). The presented filter is then applied to a position control of a mechatronic device for improving velocity feedback. Experimental results show that the presented filter provides better velocity feedback than its previous version, Janabi-Sharifi et al.’s differentiator, and combinations of these two filters.