Triple-Stage Track-Following Servo Design for Hard Disk Drives

This paper studies possible robust control design methods in triple-stage actuation settings for achieving minimum position error signal (PES) while maintaining enough stability margins. Firstly, the sensitivity-decoupling design technique, is utilized to estimate the resulting increase in low frequency disturbance attenuation and servo bandwidth. A systematic tuning methodology based on μ-synthesis is then proposed for track-following servo design of triple-stage actuation systems. In this approach, the objective is to minimize the PES, by considering all constraints and uncertainties explicitly in the design. We describe a step by step Multi-Input Single-Output (MISO) controller design methodology which includes system modeling, noise characterization, control objective determination and controller synthesis and verification. In this methodology, servo bandwidth is not the only performance metric. Rather, the control objective will be to minimize the closed-loop system H_∞ norm directly, while all stroke and control constraints are satisfied and enough stability margin is ensured. The proposed method is applied to design track-following feedback controllers for single-, dual- and triple-stage actuation systems. Simulation results show that compared to dual-stage actuation, triple-stage actuation enhances low frequency disturbance rejection by 6 dB at around 100Hz and increases servo bandwidth from ∼3kHz to ∼5kHz.