Nanometer positioning in the presence of friction

This paper deals with nanometer positioning in the presence of friction. The object studied is a ball-screw-driven and linear-ball-guide-supported table system. For this system, the friction dominates the resulting performance for micro-motion and the system exhibits microdynamic characteristic which is rather different from macrodynamics. Inherently a controller with high loop-gain is needed to suppress the effect of friction. A PID controller is designed for the table system for step height smaller than 10μm. Experiment and simulation results indicate that the PID controller can provide a sufficiently high-loop gain and effect of friction is suppressed, In point-to-point(PTP) positioning for step heights from 10μm down to 10nm, the positioning error is within ±2 nm and the response dynamics is satisfactory.