1. Introduction
In the development of modern industry, the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) has gradually become the ideal choice for engineering power systems due to its significant advantages, such as high efficiency, energy saving, high power density, and excellent torque characteristics. It is widely used in various industrial fields, including underwater vehicles [
1], electric vehicles [
2], and servo drives [
3]. However, PMSMs are complex systems characterized by multivariable interactions, strong coupling, and non-linearity, with various disturbances and parameter variations [
4,
5]. Traditional PID control methods often fail to meet the growing demands for control performance in modern industrial applications. Therefore, achieving the high-precision position control of PMSMs in engineering not only significantly enhances the equipment operational efficiency and operational accuracy but also effectively improves the system’s reliability and safety. This holds crucial significance for advancing engineering technology toward more intelligent and refined directions.
To address the limitations of traditional PI control, advanced control methods need to be introduced into the PMSM position servo control system. In [
6,
7], model predictive control methods were developed to enhance the position tracking and disturbance rejection capabilities of the PMSM. In [
8], a novel composite position controller consisting of a nonlinear gain-based sliding surface and a disturbance observer was proposed, designed for the PMSM position servo system. In [
9], a finite-time adaptive fuzzy controller was proposed to solve the precise position control problem of the PMSM under external disturbances and unknown mechanical friction. Although these control methods consider the inherent physical characteristics of the PMSM, they often require accurate model parameter identification and certain ideal assumptions as prerequisites. This results in high demands on model accuracy, which increases the difficulty and cost of engineering applications [
10,
11]. Model-free adaptive control (MFAC), a novel data-driven control (DDC) method, utilizes the input–output data of the system for controller design, thereby reducing the dependency on system model parameters and offering strong engineering applicability [
12,
13,
14,
15]. When the PMSM operates in varying environments with significant external disturbances and unmodeled uncertainties, MFAC can effectively replace conventional techniques such as parameter identification, function approximation, gain tuning, and model reduction, thus eliminating the need for the controller to rely on system nonlinearities and the control direction.
Currently, sliding mode control (SMC) methods have been widely applied due to their robustness to uncertainties and external disturbances. To fully leverage the advantages of MFAC and SMC, in [
16], SMC was introduced into MFAC, achieving a complementary advantage between the two. In [
17], a model-free adaptive sliding mode control (MFA-SMC) method for electromagnetic linear actuators was proposed, improving the robustness of the system. In [
18], a DDC method based on MFA-SMC was presented for unmanned underwater vehicles with uncertainties, addressing the issue of underactuated motion control. In [
19], a discrete extended state observer (DESO) based on MFA-SMC was introduced, optimizing the tracking accuracy of the system. While the aforementioned control methods exhibit good robustness, they face the issue of unclear transient performance. The prescribed performance control (PPC) method, known for its outstanding ability to quantitatively characterize the performance of control systems, is widely applied [
20,
21]. In [
22], a fractional-order fast terminal SMC method based on PPC was proposed, achieving DDC for nonlinear systems. In [
23,
24], an MFA-SMC strategy with PPC was studied, achieving high control accuracy for nonlinear systems. However, the aforementioned control systems still have some limitations: (1) the traditional DESO used for disturbance observation suffers from delay. (2) The use of a logarithmic error transformation function makes the controller design process more complex, increasing the application cost.
Based on this, this paper proposes a prescribed performance model-free adaptive fast integral terminal sliding mode control (PP-MFA-FITSMC) method to achieve high-precision position control for the PMSM. Compared to existing results, the main contributions include the following:
(1) The proposed PP-MFA-FITSMC method is in a discrete form, offering higher control accuracy and being easier to implement in hardware systems and engineering applications.
(2) Based on the improved prescribed performance function, a new tangent-type error transformation function is introduced. Unlike the PPC control methods in [
22,
23], the proposed framework does not rely on logarithmic functions, making the control algorithm simpler and computationally less intensive. This reduces time consumption and, by simplifying the error transformation function, ensures quantitative constraints on the system state while laying the foundation for designing the improved SMC method.
(3) Unlike the sliding mode surfaces proposed in [
22,
23,
24], the method presented in this work simplifies the error transformation function and constructs an integral terminal sliding surface based on a new approaching rate. This approach alleviates the chattering phenomenon and allows for the adjustment of the sliding variable value at different stages of convergence.
(4) In order to optimize the control system, a discrete small-gain extended state observer (DSGESO) is designed and an anti-windup compensator is introduced to compensate for the lumped disturbances of the PMSM and diminish the negative effects of input saturation on the system, respectively.
The rest of this paper is as follows:
Section 2 builds the mathematical model of the PMSM.
Section 3 designs the controller, and the convergence analysis of the error of the control system is carried out.
Section 4 is the experimental result. Finally,
Section 5 summarizes the paper.
2. Dynamic Model of the PMSM
In the d-q coordinate system, the mathematical model of the surface-mounted PMSM can be expressed as follows [
25]:
where,
,
,
, and
represent the d-q axis stator voltage and current, respectively;
θ denotes the rotor angle;
denotes the mechanical velocity;
B denotes the viscous friction coefficient;
P denotes the number of pole pairs;
J represents the moment of inertia;
Rs and
Lo denote the stator resistance and inductance, respectively;
ψf denotes the magnetic flux linkage; and
Tl denotes the external load torque.
Simplifying Equation (1), the motion equation of the PMSM can be obtained as follows:
where
represents the lumped disturbance term.
Let the desired position be represented by
θr and the position tracking error be expressed as the system state
x1 =
θr −
θ.
iq is defined as the system input
u, and
,
x = [
x1,
x2]
T; therefore, Equation (2) can be restructured as follows:
where
,
,
.
Using the Euler method for Equation (3), the following discretization model can be obtained:
where
, and
Ts is the sampling period.
3. Controller Design and Convergence Analysis
To address the complexity of modeling the PMSM and the difficulty in obtaining an accurate model, a tight-format dynamic linearization model of the PMSM is used. Based on this, the design and analysis of the PP-MFA-FITSMC method, combining MFAC, DSGESO, PPC, and FITSMC, are as follows:
3.1. Design of Model-Free Adaptive Control Method
Based on MFAC theory [
12], the PMSM position control problem is transformed to determine an appropriate control input
um(
k) such that the output displacement can accurately reach the target position. The discrete nonlinear model of the PMSM is as follows:
where,
f(·) represents an unknown nonlinear function,
nd and
nu denote the unknown orders of the output and input, and
represents the output disturbance of the PMSM.
Substituting Equation (6) into Equation (5) yields
Therefore, the following can be concluded:
where
,
, and
.
Thus, the tight-format linearization method is chosen to represent the relationship between the PMSM output displacement and the control input signal. The following assumptions are satisfied:
Assumption 1: The control input and output in Equation (5) are controllable and observable. If the given reference signal yr(k + 1) and control input um(k) are bounded, then the output signal yd(k + 1) can track the desired reference signal.
Assumption 2: The partial derivative of yd(k + 1) with respect to um(k) is continuous.
Assumption 3: The system is in compliance with the generalized Lipschitz condition. For any time k and , there exists , where , and is a normal constant.
Thus, a pseudo-partial derivative (PPD), represented by
, is defined, and the tight-format data model of PMSM can be designed as follows:
where
R is a given positive constant, and by adjusting
R, the issue of singularity caused by
being too small is avoided.
Substituting Equation (9) into Equation (8) yields the following:
Define
as the estimate of
, and
, then Equation (10) is subsequently rewritten as follows:
Define the composite disturbance
, then Equation (11) becomes the following:
The update rule of the PPD estimation value is realized by designing an objective function, and the objective function is designed as follows:
where
denotes the weighting factor, and
is the estimate of
. Solving for
gives the following:
where
. As
is time-varying, a new parameter reset mechanism is introduced into the PPD estimation algorithm:
,
or
,
; else,
is calculated as Equation (14), where
is the initial value of
. This method can adapt to the rapidity requirements of the PMSM.
3.2. Design of the Discrete Small-Gain Extended State Observer
Since the composite disturbance is unknown, the DSGESO is used to estimate , and satisfies the following assumptions:
Assumption 4: For any time step, , where , and b is a positive constant.
Define the state variables
; then the system state equation can be expressed as follows:
where
,
, and
.
Then, the traditional DESO is formulated as follows:
where
,
denotes the estimated values of
,
L = [
l1, 0;
l2, 0] denotes the gain matrix of the DESO, and
,
,
ω0 is the observer bandwidth.
denotes the estimation error matrix.
When estimating all state variables, if only the displacement estimation error is used, the traditional DESO first completes the tracking of , followed by the tracking of . In this case, when decreases, a larger value of gain l2 is required to achieve a good estimate of . However, this limitation can exacerbate initial peak phenomena and the phase lag, severely degrading control performance and potentially damaging the structure of the PMSM.
To address this issue and improve the estimation performance, the DSGESO is formulated as follows [
13]:
where
Lo = [
lo1, 0; 0,
lo2] denotes the gain matrix.
In the estimation process of
using DSGESO, replace
with
. Combined with Equations (15) and (17), it is obtained:
Therefore, define
, and the observation error for the DSGESO is given by the following:
where
,
,
.
The characteristic polynomial of the Equation (19) is
For simplicity, the Equation (20) is transformed to
Therefore, the gain of the DSGESO is designed as follows: , . must satisfy .
Remark 1. Compared to the traditional DESO in Equation (16), lo2 can be selected to be less than l2, which alleviates the peak phenomena caused by excessively high gains in the traditional DESO. Additionally, compared to the traditional DESO, the DSGESO can significantly reduce the phase lag and improve the convergence speed.
3.3. Input Saturation
Input saturation can lead to instability in permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) and may even damage the motor. Since conventional input saturation constraints alone cannot ensure stable PMSM operation, it is necessary to impose simultaneous constraints on both the amplitude and rate of change of the control input. Therefore, based on reference [
15], the saturation constraint based on
um,0(
k) is as follows:
where
um min and
um max signify the lower and upper limits of input signal saturation, respectively.
and
are the saturation rate limits.
Thus, the actual control law is designed as follows:
The Sat (⋅) function is defined as follows:
where
Qmax and
Qmin are the upper and lower limits of the Sat(·) function.
Considering that input saturation will lead to a sharp decline in the performance of the PMSM and, in severe cases, may even jeopardize system stability, an anti-saturation compensator is introduced as follows:
where
βo∈(0,1),
represents the nominal input signal of the system.
From Equations (12) and (26), the position output error
of the PMSM is given by the following:
3.4. Design of Prescribed Performance Control
Consider the following discrete-time positive decreasing boundary and the prescribed performance function
defined as follows:
where, define
,
ρ0 represents the initial value of
, satisfying 0 <
ρ∞ <
ρ0, and the convergence rate
θ1 is a weighting factor, representing the rate at which the control function decreases, and
θo is a parameter to be designed.
PPC ensures that the position control error remains within the predefined boundary (28). By introducing the transformed error
in the strictly monotonically increasing function
, the error convergence domain is constructed from the performance function:
To achieve Equation (28), the novel arctangent-type function
is designed as follows:
Thus, the transformed error
,
is expressed as follows:
Remark 2. In the subsequent controller design, the use of the tangent function tan(∙) is avoided, and is used as the error constraint condition. If satisfies , then the transformed error is bounded, meaning the error satisfies . Furthermore, the constraint condition (28) ensures that .
3.5. Design of the Controller
To further enhance the robustness of the control system, based on [
26], the fast integral terminal sliding mode surface is designed using the simplified error transformation function
as follows:
where
λ1 and
λ2 are normal constants, while
λ3 is the ratio of two odd numbers, satisfying 0 <
λ3 < 1. The phase plane diagram of the proposed sliding surface is illustrated in
Figure 1. The control objective is to design a controller that constrains
e(
k) within the interval defined by Equation (28) and drives it to converge to zero. As shown in
Figure 1, the boundaries of the sliding motion for the sliding surface intersect with the horizontal axis between ρ
∞ and −ρ
∞ in Regions I and III, respectively. The initial error range is bounded by [−ρ
0, ρ
0], ensuring that the tracking error always remains within the prescribed performance boundaries.
Therefore,
is designed as follows:
Let
, from Equation (34), it follows that
The control input signal
is designed as follows:
where
consists of the equivalent control law
and the switching control law
, represented as follows:
By combining Equation (27) and Equation (35),
can be derived as follows:
To guarantee finite-time convergence to the sliding mode surface, overcome the drawbacks of traditional reaching laws, and avoid chattering when reaching the sliding mode surface,
is designed as follows:
where
,
,
,
are all positive real numbers, and
,
,
.
Remark 3. From Equation (39), it can be seen that the reaching law achieves dual optimization through dynamic gain adjustment: it accelerates convergence when far from the sliding surface to improve the reaching speed and automatically decelerates near the sliding surface to suppress chattering, thereby balancing the rapid response with control smoothness.
Thus, the system controller is designed as follows:
The Sat(⋅) function is defined as follows:
where
um max and
um min are the upper and lower bounds of the Sat(·) function.
In summary, the control block diagram of the PP-MFA-FITSMC for the PMSM is shown in
Figure 2.
3.6. System Convergence Analysis
Lemma 1 ([
27])
. For the discrete SMC systems, the necessary and sufficient condition for reachability is as follows:If the above inequality (42) holds, se(k) will asymptotically converge to the sliding surface.
Lemma 2 ([
26])
. The following system is considered:where η1 > 0, 0 < η2 < 1, 0 < m < 1. If the variable , then the system state h(k) will gradually converge into the following domain in a finite time: Theorem 1. Consider Equation (5) that satisfies assumptions 1, 2, and 3. Assuming ρ0(k) < e0(k) < ρ0(k) holds, the control method proposed in this paper, as described by Equation (41), ensures that the position error e(k) is constrained within the prescribed boundaries and that the estimation error is bounded with respect to the sliding surface s(k).
Proof. 1. Boundedness of the DSGESO estimation error
From Equation (19), the DSGESO observation error can be transformed as follows:
where
.
Therefore, the nominal system of Equation (45) can be defined as follows:
The designed DSGESO is stable only when all the eigenvalues of the matrix
are located within the unit circle. The characteristic polynomial of
is derived as follows:
By substituting
z = (
w + 1)/(
w − 1) into Equation (47), the characteristic polynomial can be obtained:
According to the Routh criterion, the condition for the stability of the matrix
is as follows:
Due to the observer gains
, substituting into Equation (49) yields
Therefore, when
, the system is globally asymptotically stable. It is deduced that
From Assumption 4,
, and then it follows that
Thus, is bounded, and then, is also bounded.
2. Boundedness of s(k)
Substituting Equations (27) and (40) into Equation (34) yields
From Equation (53), it can be concluded that
where the parameters of the controller in Inequality (54) satisfy the following inequalities:
Next,
where the parameters of the controller in Inequality (56) satisfy the following inequalities:
Define
; then, from Inequality (56), it can be concluded that [
s(
k + 1)
+ s(
k)]sign(
s(
k)) > 0 holds if and only if the following inequality is satisfied:
Accordingly, define the bounded region as follows:
When
holds, that is, when Inequality (58) is satisfied, the reachability condition of the sliding mode surface is fulfilled. Therefore,
s(
k) will gradually converge to the region
. Once
,
will always hold:
According to the above analysis, the sliding mode surface converges to a bounded region.
3. Boundedness of the output error e(k)
From Equations (33) and (34), it can be seen that
From this, it follows that
where
From Inequality (64) and Equation (65), it can be obtained that
is bounded, satisfying the following:
Combining with Lemma 2, it can be concluded that
By appropriately choosing parameters , and , it can be ensured that inequality (67) satisfies . The variable gradually reaches and enters the bounded set through suitable parameters. Therefore, e(k) is always confined within the predefined adjustable domain.
4. The boundedness of
Let
, where
is the estimation error of
. Subtracting
from both sides of Equation (14) yields the following:
where since
, then
, and then
and
can be derived, where
A1 ≤ 1; therefore, by applying the absolute value to Inequality (68), the following can be obtained:
Obviously, the PPD estimation error is bounded and is bounded and convergent.
Proof end. □
5. Conclusions
To enhance the position control accuracy of PMSMs, this paper proposes the PP-MFA-FITSMC method, which combines MFAC, DSGESO, and PP-FITSMC.
(1) In the MFAC framework, the proposed controller design does not rely on the mathematical model parameters of the PMSM, and DSGESO is utilized to observe and compensate for system states and disturbances, thus improving system robustness. By designing PP-FITSMC, the method further integrates the advantages of the improved prescribed performance function and FITSMC. This ensures that the position error converges within the prescribed bounds while retaining the fast response of the designed sliding mode surface and its disturbance rejection capability. The method is easy to implement and demonstrates strong practical control performance.
(2) To better understand the impact of controller parameter variations on system performance, a sensitivity analysis experiment for key controller parameters was designed using the response surface methodology. This yielded second-order regression equations relating the key parameters to the system settling time and steady-state error range. Based on the regression equations, the individual and interactive effects of these parameters on the control performance were quantified, providing valuable guidance for controller parameter tuning.
(3) Experimental comparisons show that PP-MFA-FITSMC outperforms other methods with faster convergence and no overshoot. In the presence of load disturbances and measurement noise, the tracking error of PP-MFA-FITSMC remains largely confined within ±0.001 rad, while the tracking errors of the other methods are more dispersed. This indicates that the proposed method effectively improves both the dynamic and steady-state performance and robustness of the PMSM position servo system.
Future work will focus on applying the proposed method to real-world engineering applications, providing further validation and enhancing the success rate of practical operations.