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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY
Optimal Tracking Control of Motion Systems
Anusha Mannava, S. N. Balakrishnan, Member, IEEE, Lie Tang, and Robert G. Landers, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Tracking control of motion systems typically requires
accurate nonlinear friction models, especially at low speeds, and
integral action. However, building accurate nonlinear friction
models is time consuming, friction characteristics dramatically
change over time, and special care must be taken to avoid windup
in a controller employing integral action. In this paper a new
approach is proposed for the optimal tracking control of motion
systems with significant disturbances, parameter variations, and
unmodeled dynamics. The ‘desired’ control signal that will keep
the nominal system on the desired trajectory is calculated based
on the known system dynamics and is utilized in a performance
index to design an optimal controller. However, in the presence of
disturbances, parameter variations, and unmodeled dynamics, the
desired control signal must be adjusted. This is accomplished by
using neural network based observers to identify these quantities,
and update the control signal on-line. This formulation allows
for excellent motion tracking without the need for the addition of
an integral state. The system stability is analyzed and Lyapunov
based weight update rules are applied to the neural networks
to guarantee the boundedness of the tracking error, disturbance
estimation error, and neural network weight errors. Experiments
are conducted on the linear axes of a mini CNC machine for the
contour control of two orthogonal axes, and the results demon-
strate the excellent performance of the proposed methodology.
Index Terms—Lyapunov stability analysis, motion systems,
neural network observer, optimal control, uncertainty estimation.
I. INTRODUCTION
I N many applications, precise motion control is critical to
ensure the quality of the application. For example, axis er-
rors in machining operations directly result in part geometric
errors. When a motion system contains multiple axes, an im-
portant quality metric is contour error [1], which is defined as
the shortest distance between the desired contour and the actual
position. The desired contour error accuracy can be obtained
by reducing the individual axial errors, provided the design has
high tracking bandwidth and robustness [2]. One such technique
is zero phase tracking error control (ZPTEC) [3]. This method
and its extensions (e.g., [4], [5]) demonstrate good tracking per-
formance and zero phase error between the reference and output.
A methodology using feedback, feedforward, and model-based
Manuscript received March 17, 2011; revised July 09, 2011; accepted
September 09, 2011. Manuscript received in final form September 10, 2011.
Recommended by Associate Editor Y. Bestaoui. This work was supported in
part by NASA under Grant ARMD NRA NNH07ZEA001N-IRAC1 and by
the National Science Foundation. The views of the authors do not necessarily
represent the views of the NSF or the NASA.
The authors are with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO
65401-0050 USA (e-mail: amtp2@mst.edu; bala@mst.edu; ltx8d@mst.edu;
landersr@mst.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2011.2168608
1063-6536/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE
1
friction compensation was presented in [6]. The drawback to
this methodology is that modeling nonlinear friction is difficult
and the model changes substantially over time. Biaxial contour
control subject to friction has been studied in [7]. The friction
is observed with a state observer. Based on the results of state
observation, friction is estimated and compensated. However,
experimental results indicate that the observer suffers from a
long settling time and high frequency oscillations.
Many studies have investigated cross-coupled controllers to
regulate the contour error (i.e., the distance from the actual posi-
tion to the contour the system is attempting to track). Although
several control techniques that handle cross-coupling effects
were proposed (e.g., [8]–[11]) and show good results, the effect
of introducing such controllers on the overall system dynamics
was not examined [12]. Subsequently, adaptive robust control
[13]–[15] was introduced for systems with uncertainties and can
effectively handle bounded disturbances while preserving tran-
sient performance. Model-based position synchronization [16],
[17] and sliding mode based robust controllers [18]–[20] are
some of the other approaches taken towards minimizing con-
tour errors. Other contour error control methods include iter-
ative learning control [21], hierarchical control [22], and Ly-
punov-based control [23]. To further improve controller results,
other studies considered adaptive feedrate schemes based on
methods such as fuzzy logic [24], [25] and predictive control
[26]. Recently, contour control has been extended to five axis
machines [27].
In this paper an optimal tracking controller for uncertain sys-
tems is proposed and applied to contour tracking applications.
The desired control signal history (i.e., the amount of control
required to keep the states of the nominal system on the de-
sired trajectories) is computed a priori using the known system
dynamics. A performance index is defined in terms of devia-
tion from the desired states, as well as deviation from the de-
sired control signal. An optimal controller is constructed that
can provide tracking without the utilization of an integrator.
Therefore, saturation due to integral windup does not occur and
anti-windup schemes are not required. Controllers are designed
for each motion axis separately and the contour error is mini-
mized by reducing the axial errors. Since motion systems are
susceptible to disturbances such as nonlinear friction, cogging
torques, etc., and parameter variations and unmodeled dynamics
exist, neural network based observers are used to estimate these
effects. This information is used to adjust the desired control
signal on-line to compensate for disturbances, parameter varia-
tions, and unmodeled dynamics. A proof is provided that guar-
antees the boundedness of the tracking error, disturbance esti-
mation error, and neural network weights.
The advantages of the proposed method are two-fold. First,
traditional control methodologies [28] for multi-axis motion
control usually rely on integrators to avoid the constant bias in
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY

the tracking error, which may cause integral “wind up”, leading
to actuator saturation and loss of transient performance [29],
[30]. Thus, anti-windup schemes have to be used. Although
anti-windup schemes may not be difficult to apply, they may
deteriorate controller performance, which is critical for high
precision motion control tasks. This deterioration (e.g., increase
in response time) is due to the fact that the anti-windup scheme
changes the closed-loop dynamics when saturation occurs. The
methodology proposed in this paper requires no integral oper-
ation and thus no anti-windup scheme, helping to improve the
controller performance and reduce the controller complexity.
Second, by integrating the uncertainty estimation neural net-
work as a part of an observer formulation, the uncertainties
are learned very fast without high frequency oscillations [31],
enabling excellent transient performance. Moreover, the un-
certainty estimation provides an estimate of the nonlinearities,
such as nonlinear friction and cogging, which are difficult to
model. This knowledge of system behavior can be used in the
analysis of the motion system dynamics and in identifying
disturbance bounds.
II. CONTROL DESIGN PROCEDURE
The proposed optimal tracking controller design procedure is
now given.
A. Controller Design for Nominal System
where , is an -dimensioned Lagrange multiplier and
is a positive definite symmetric matrix determined
from the nonlinear Riccati equation
(5)
and
(6)
is defined as the tracking error. Note that the structure of the
performance index in (2) results in a control law that does not
require integral action to track a desired trajectory.
B. Controller Design for Uncertainties
Since disturbances, parameter variations, and unmodeled
dynamics affect the motion system, the true system model is
written as
(7)
where is the state-dependent uncertainty. Since we
consider only matched uncertainties (that is uncertainties ap-
pear only in equations containing the control signals), the coef-
ficient matrix, contains zeros and constants. Entries
with constants correspond to the equations containing the con-
trol components and, therefore, contain the uncertainties.
Assumption 1: The uncertainty is bounded by

Consider the nominal system dynamics (8)

(1) This is to ensure the boundedness of the estimation and motion

tracking errors. Since the true dynamics are different from (1),
where is the state vector and is the control vector. the steady state control defined in (4) does not hold and should
The state coefficient matrix is and the control coefficient be obtained from
matrix is . The system is required to follow the desired
signal . In order to achieve this, the performance index (9)
to be minimized is defined as
However, since the uncertainty is unknown to the designer,
it must be estimated. A neural network-based observer is pro-
posed next to explicitly estimate . Neural Networks are ad-
vantageous since they allow the estimation of the uncertainty
(2) reliably, which in turn can be used in the control law.

where and are symmetric weighting matrices that C. Neural Network Based Estimation
penalize deviations between the states and the desired states and
The output of the neural network is given by
between the control and the desired control, respectively. The
term is the desired control signal, computed from the (10)
known system dynamics in (1) as
where is a matrix of estimated weights and is the
(3) number of neurons in the network and is the basis
function vector, which is defined as
The desired control signal is the amount of control required to
keep the nominal system on the desired trajectory. The desired
trajectory can be any non-zero, time-varying quantity from
(11)
which the corresponding time-varying desired control can be
computed. If , the problem reduces to a regulation where kron denotes the Kronecker product and
problem and the desired control for a stable system will be
zero. The total control signal, obtained by minimizing the cost (12)
function in (2) is given by
Trigonometric functions are chosen to construct the basis func-
(4) tion vector since these functions form an orthogonal basis and
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MANNAVA et al.: OPTIMAL TRACKING CONTROL OF MOTION SYSTEMS 3

Fig. 1. Proposed controller block diagram.

have the capability to represent nonlinear functions accurately.
Also, they allow the constraint on the basis function vector mag-
nitude to be formulated as
(13)
where is the basis function norm upper bound. From the
universal function approximation property of neural networks
[32], it can be stated that there exists an ideal neural network
with an optimum weight vector and basis function vector
that approximates to an accuracy of
(14)
Different architectures for neural networks exist in the literature
[33]. In this paper, a linear-in-the-parameter network is chosen.
The reasons are three fold: to keep the architecture simple and
mathematically tractable, and not computationally intensive.
Assumption 2: The ideal weight is bounded by
in this paper and in other studies that utilize neural networks.
By using this observer structure, transient performance can be
tuned via the observer gains.
Theorem 1: A stable weight update rule with full state mea-
surement given by
(19)
stabilizes the estimation error , the tracking error , and the
adaptive weights of the online network. Adaptation rates
are used along with a modification factor of
to enforce the bound on the neural network weights and pro-
vide robustness. The proof of Theorem 1 is provided in the
Appendix.
D. Desired Control Signal Adjustment
With the approximated uncertainty, the desired control can
now be computed from

(15) (20)
Assumption 3: The neural network approximation error is where . The system uncertainty can be taken
bounded by into account in the control design by redefining the desired con-
trol signal based on the uncertainty estimation. The total control
(16)
signal is the combination of the redefined desired control and
This error can be reduced by increasing the number of neurons feedback control signals, similar to (4). Essentially, the feed-
in the neural network design. The state estimator structure is back component of the control is used only to shape the tran-
sient dynamics. A block diagram representation of the proposed
(17) controller is given in Fig. 1. The estimated state vector and es-
timated weights are both initialized to zero.
The estimation error is then expressed as where the
estimation error dynamics are E. Design Parameter Selection
(18) The stability properties of the controller formulation are ana-
lyzed using the Lyapunov function
where is the error between the actual and
ideal neural network weights. Although the observer estimates (21)
system states are assumed to be measurable, the utility of the
modified observer structure is the estimation of the process un- where “tr” is the trace operator and and are adaptation
certainties. In fact, the modified observer structure is the major rates chosen as positive definite matrices. For ease of design,
difference between how process uncertainties are estimated these rates are chosen such that only the diagonal elements are
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY

TABLE I
SELECTION CRITERIA FOR OBSERVER DESIGN PARAMETERS

non-zero. Through Lyapunov stability analysis (see Appendix),

the bounds on the errors in tracking, estimation, and neural net-
work weights can be deduced, respectively, as

(22)

(23)

(24)

where

(25)

(26)

The matrix is positive definite since adaption rates and

observer gain are chosen as positive definite. The matrix
is negative definite since the adaptation rate is chosen
as positive definite while the closed-loop matrix for the nom-
inal controller, , is negative definite. If the
error norms are greater than the bounds then the Lyapunov func-
tion becomes negative definite and the error decreases. Once
the error norm is within the bound, the errors continue to re-
main in that region. It is possible to design the observer and
the controller such that the error bounds are small. Table I pro-
vides selection criteria for the observer parameters. The rate of
convergence of neural network weights depends on the adap-
tive rate . High adaptation rate enables fast estimation of
strong nonlinearities and time-varying system parameters; how-
ever, high adaptation rate is detrimental to the reduction of es-
timation error as shown in (22). The larger the adaptation rate,
the greater the oscillations will be during estimation. In order to
obtain smoother estimation signals, the observer gain must
be large too, while satisfying the constraint on . The tracking
error in the weight update rule given in (19) is useful only in
demonstrating the stability of the system and the learning rate
accompanying it must be small to avoid a large bound on the
tracking error. The bound in (24) shows that for larger uncer-
tainties the tracking performance is poorer, unless the nominal
closed-loop linear system , which is a part of
, has large eigenvalues. The weighting matrices and can
be chosen accordingly.
III. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
In order to test the effectiveness of the proposed optimal
tracking controller, experimental studies are conducted on the
Fig. 2. Mini CNC machine used in experimental studies.
mini CNC machine shown in Fig. 2. The machine consists of
three orthogonal axes and a spindle. The control system block
diagram is built using MATLAB Simulink and downloaded to
a xPC target computer with a 800 MHz Pentium III processor
and 384 MB RAM via Ethernet. A schematic of the experi-
mental system setup is shown in Fig. 3. The computer running
Target xPC is equipped with a National Instrument’s PCI-6711
analog output board and a National Instrument’s PCI-6602
counter/timer board. The PCI-6711 board, with a range of 10
V and 12 bits of resolution, is used to output control signals
to the axis amplifiers, while the PCI-6602 counter/timer board
measures the encoder feedback. The axis motors are equipped
with incremental optical encoders providing a linear position
sensing resolution of 0.108 m in quadrature mode. All exper-
iments are conducted with a sampling frequency of 1000 Hz.
IV. AXIS MODELING
Ignoring the electrical dynamics, which are faster than the
mechanical dynamics, each axis is modeled in the continuous
domain as
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MANNAVA et al.: OPTIMAL TRACKING CONTROL OF MOTION SYSTEMS
Fig. 3. Experimental setup schematic.
(27)
(28)
(29)
(30)
where is the position (mm), is the time constant is
the axis speed (mm/s), is the gain ((mm/s)/V), V is the com-
mand voltage (V), is the measurement (mm), and is the un-
known nonlinear friction (mm/s), which experimental studies
have found to be well modeled as Coulomb friction. The non-
linear friction is more complicated than this model, and sub-
stantially changes over time; however, it represents the major
portion of the unknown disturbances and will be used to com-
pare to the results of the disturbance estimator. The system pa-
rameters for each axis are given in Table II. To determine the
model parameters for the axes, a pyramid command voltage
signal is sent to the servo motor and the corresponding axis
speed is recorded. The model parameters are then determined
using a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm [34], [35]. To
demonstrate the model performance, the simulated -axis ve-
locity using the developed model is compared with the mea-
sured velocity for a pyramid command voltage, as shown in
Fig. 4. The results demonstrate that -axis model fits the ex-
perimental data very well. The average error percentage is
% % (31)
The state-space model for each axis is given by (7), where
, and
. The desired state vector is , interpolator is used to generate the desired position signals.
where is the desired position (mm) and is the desired ve-
locity (mm/s).
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The proposed method is tested on the mini CNC machine for
diamond contours using the - and -axes for two cases. The
number of neurons used in both case studies is 9, which is de-
termined using trial and error by observing the control perfor-
mance. In Case I the model parameters in Table II were used to
design the desired controller. In Case II the model gains were
5
Fig. 4. -axis velocity model and experimental results comparison.
TABLE II
LINEAR AXIS SYSTEM PARAMETERS
both increased to 2.5 (mm/s)/V and these values were used to
design the desired controller. The desired control signal for each
axis is
(32)
where provides the uncertainty estimate, which is
mainly dominated by the nonlinear friction in Case I. However,
in Case II, the uncertainty is dominated by the nonlinear friction
and the difference between the estimated and true gain. The
total control signal for each axis is
(33)
The feedback portion of the controllers for both axes are
designed using the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) with
weighting matrices and ,
adaptation rates , and ,
and an observer gain . The axes track
the diamond profile given in Fig. 5 for two cycles with
mm/s and a sampling interval of 1 ms. A constant velocity
In order to avoid unlearning and relearning the uncertainty
each time the axes change direction, two neural networks are
used: one for each direction of motion. Note that the neural
network weight update rule in Theorem 1 and the feedback law
were developed for the full state measurement. Since only the
position of each axis is measured (30), a pseudo-measurement
of velocity is created by taking the forward difference of the
measurement .
The system performance is now analyzed in terms of axial
and contour errors. The contour error for a linear contour is
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY
Fig. 5. Diamond contour schematic.
(34)
In Case I, the LQR controller is designed based on the nom-
inal model parameters given in Table II. In this case
, and
The axial and contour error signals are given in Fig. 6. The
plots on the left side of Fig. 6 are the complete error signals.
The maximum absolute contour error is 22.1 m. The spikes in
the error signals correspond to changes in the direction of an
axis and are due to the fact that the diamond contour is discon-
tinuous at these points and a constant velocity interpolator is
utilized. It can be observed that the - and -axes have max-
imum tracking errors of 31.2 and 30.9 m, respectively, during
the transient phases. The transient error could be reduced if con-
stant acceleration or jerk interpolators are used. The plots on the
right-hand side of Fig. 6 are the detailed steady-state error sig-
nals. The mean values of the absolute values of the -, -axis,
and contour errors, respectively, are 0.125, 0.109, and 0.110 m.
These values are within two resolutions of the sensor signals,
demonstrating the proposed controller is able to provide excel-
lent tracking performance even though an integral state is not
utilized in the controller.
The axis uncertainty estimations, computed using the neural
network based observers, are shown in Fig. 7. These estimations
account for disturbances, parameter variations, and unmodeled
dynamics. The mean uncertainty estimations for the -axis in
the positive and negative directions of motion are 0.701 and
0.314 mm/s, respectively, which are within 0.07 mm/s of the
nonlinear friction values given in Table II. This indicates the
uncertainty in the -axis is mainly due to the nonlinear friction.
The mean uncertainty estimations for the -axis in the positive
and negative direction of motion are 0.470 and 1.05 mm/s,
respectively, which are within 0.25 mm/s of the nonlinear fric-
tion values given in Table II. This indicates the uncertainty in
the -axis is due to the nonlinear friction as well as other effects
such as model parameter variations. The uncertainty estimation
in the -axis also varies slightly during the steady operation of
Fig. 6. Case I axial and contour error signals.
.
Fig. 7. Case I uncertainty and axis control signals.
the axis. This variation is most likely due to the position-depen-
dent nature of the nonlinear friction, which appears to be more
pronounced in the -axis than in the y axis. The axis control
signals are also given in Fig. 7. The control signals temporarily
saturate when either axis changes direction; however, this does
not affect the system stability or performance during steady op-
eration. The experimental results also demonstrate that the xPC
target computer is capable of executing the entire control system
at a sample time of 1 ms without overloading the CPU, as a CPU
overload error occurs when the CPU time required by the con-
trol application is greater than the sample time.
The uncertainty and axis tracking error transient responses
at the first corner are shown in Fig. 8. It can be observed that
the tracking error and uncertainty estimation stabilize in ap-
proximately 0.05 s and no high frequency oscillations are ob-
served, indicating that the neural network-based estimator per-
forms very well during the transient phase.
In order to test the robustness of the proposed control
methodology, in Case II the LQR controller is designed
based on the nominal time constants in Table II and gains
of 2.5 (mm/s)/V, increases of 32% and 56%, re-
spectively. In this case
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MANNAVA et al.: OPTIMAL TRACKING CONTROL OF MOTION SYSTEMS
Fig. 8. Case I uncertainty and axis tracking error transient responses at first
corner.
Fig. 9. Case II axial and contour error signals.
and . The axial and contour error signals
are given in Fig. 9. The plots on the left side of Fig. 9 are the
complete error signals. The maximum absolute values of the -,
-axis, and contour errors, respectively, are 31.4, 33.5, and 23.8
m. These errors are within 8% of the corresponding errors
in Case I. Again the spikes in the error signals correspond to
a change in the direction of an axis and are due to the fact
that the diamond contour is discontinuous at these points. The
plots on the right side of Fig. 9 are the zoomed-in error signals.
The mean values of the absolute values of the -, -axis, and
contour errors, respectively, are 0.145, 0.168, and 0.126 m.
Similar to Case I, these values are within two resolutions of the
sensor signals, again indicating excellent tracking during steady
operation. Comparing the axial and contour errors generated in
both cases, it can be seen that the controller performance is not
affected by the model uncertainties considered in this study.
The axis uncertainty estimations, computed using the neural
network based observers, are shown in Fig. 10. The uncertainty
7
Fig. 10. Case II uncertainty and axis control signals.
Fig. 11. Case II uncertainty and axis tracking error transient response at first
corner.
now is mainly due to the nonlinear friction and the change is
model gain, which is given by
(35)
where is the variation in the model gain. The mean un-
certainty estimations for the -axis in the positive and nega-
tive directions of motion are 2.19 and 1.69 mm/s, respec-
tively, compared to values of 2.17 and 1.74 mm/s computing
using (35). The mean uncertainty estimations for the -axis in
the positive and negative directions of motion are 2.34 and
3.16 mm/s, respectively, compared to values of 2.53 and 3.41
mm/s computing using (35). These results indicate the neural
network based observers are estimating the uncertainty in the
- and -axes very well. The axis control signals are also given
in Fig. 10. Again, the control signals temporarily saturate when
either axis changes direction; however, this does not affect the
system stability or performance during steady operation.
The uncertainty and axis tracking error transient responses at
the first corner for Case II are shown in Fig. 11. In comparison
with the transient responses shown in Fig. 8, the settling time for
both tracking error and uncertainty estimation remain approxi-
mately 0.05 s and no high frequency oscillations are observed.
However, it is noted that the uncertainty estimations in Case II
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY

Fig. 12. Case II position and velocity estimation.

have larger magnitudes during the steady phase due to the incor-
rect model gain used, indicating the neural network based esti-
mator performs very well during the transient phase even when
the model parameters are much different than the nominal ones.
The measured axis position, estimated axis position and esti-
mated axis velocities are plotted in Fig. 12. The average abso-
lute velocity estimation errors for - and -axis are
(mm/s) and (mm/s), respectively. It can be seen that
the observer works very well in estimating the axis position and
velocity since no high frequency oscillations are observed and
the estimation errors are small.
APPENDIX
BOUNDS ON TRACKING, DISTURBANCE ESTIMATION, AND
NEURAL NETWORK WEIGHT ERRORS
This section shows the derivation that leads to Theorem 1
presented in the section neural network-based estimation. The
idea here is to first formulate a Lyapunov function in terms of
the errors in the approximate system states, tracking errors and
the error between the ideal weight and the actual weight of the
neural networks. Second, a weight update law will be selected
to make the rate of change of the Lyapunov function less than or
equal to zero. The bound on the inequality will lead to bounds
on the errors. Let

VI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION (36)

This study presented a new optimal tracking controller for be a candidate Lyapunov function. Taking the derivative of (36)
motion systems containing significant disturbances, model pa- with respect to time
rameter variations, and unmodeled dynamics. The performance
index was modified with the introduction of the desired con-
trol signal and a neural network observer was used to modify
the control signal on-line to account for disturbances, model pa- (37)
rameter variations, and unmodeled dynamics. Lyapunov-based
weight update rules were used to guarantee the boundedness of The tracking error dynamics are given by
the tracking error, disturbance estimation error, and neural net-
work weight errors. The optimal tracking controller was imple- (38)
mented on a mini CNC and the results demonstrated excellent
tracking results, without the use of integral control, even when By combining (37) and (38), the Lyapunov function derivative
there was significant variation in the model gains. The exper- can be expressed as
imental results showed the neural network estimator was able
to accurately estimate the disturbances acting on the motion
system and the model parameter variations that were present.
The experimental results also demonstrate that the neural net-
work based estimator performs very well during the transient
phase and no high frequency oscillations are observed even
when the model parameters are much different from the nominal
ones. The neural network based estimator enhances the under-
standing of the system dynamics and could be used to analyze
the nonlinearities further. (39)
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MANNAVA et al.: OPTIMAL TRACKING CONTROL OF MOTION SYSTEMS 9

Computing and using (25) and (26), respectively, ap- where . After completing the square
plying the trace property , and adding and sub- on the term with
tracting the term , (39) can be rewritten as

(40)

In order to drive the error in the approximate system, , the (46)

tracking error, , and the error, between the ideal neural net-
work weights for perfect approximation of the model uncertain- Since
ties and the actual neural network weights to be bounded by
parameters that a designer can choose, the weight update rule
given in (19) is chosen. Furthermore, is a negative definite
matrix. Substituting the weight update rule in (19) into (40)
(47)

Equation (46) becomes

(41)

Since , (41) can be rewritten as

(48)

The negative definiteness of the Lyapunov function is proved if

and either of the two following conditions is satisfied:

a)

(42)

Equation (42) can be reduced to

b)
(43)

Applying norms to every term on the right-hand side of (43)

Applying these conditions, the bounds on the tracking, estima-

tion, and neural network weight errors, respectively, are given
by (22)–(24). Thus, the ultimate upper bounds of these errors
have been derived. The selection of the design parameters to
(44) reduce these bounds has been discussed previously. The system
performance is given by the contour error in (34). Since the con-
where and denote maximum and minimum tour error is a direct function of servomechanism tracking errors,
eigenvalues, respectively. By applying Assumptions 1–3, (44) the contour error is bounded by
can be expressed as
(49)

Since the system performance, which is given by the contour

error, is described by the performance of subsystems that do not
interact, the stability of the system is guaranteed by the stability
(45) of the subsystems.
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10
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Anusha Mannava received the B.S. degree from Jawaharlal Nehru Techno-
logical University, Hyderabad, India, in 2008 and the M.S. degree in electrical
engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, in
2010.
Her research interests include optimal control and neural networks.
S. N. Balakrishnan (M’10) received the Ph.D. de-
gree in aerospace engineering from the University of
Texas, Austin.
He is currently a Curators’ Professor of Aerospace
Engineering with the Department of Mechanical and
Aerospace Engineering, Missouri University of Sci-
ence and Technology, Rolla. His research interests in-
clude neural networks, optimal control, and control
of large-scale and impulse systems. His papers using
the development of techniques in these areas include
applications to missiles, spacecraft, aircraft, robotics,
temperature, animal population control, and manufacturing.
Lie Tang received the B.E. and M.E. degrees
in electrical engineering from Hohai University,
Nanjing, China, in 2001 and 2005, respectively, and
the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from
Missouri University of Science and Technology,
Rolla, in 2009.
He is currently a Post Doctoral Researcher with
the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace En-
gineering, Missouri University of Science and Tech-
nology (formerly University of Missouri—Rolla).
His research interests include modeling, simulation,
and control of mechatronics systems, manufacturing processes, and hydrogen
fuel cells.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
MANNAVA et al.: OPTIMAL TRACKING CONTROL OF MOTION SYSTEMS
Robert G. Landers (SM’11) received the Ph.D. de-
gree in mechanical engineering from the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1997.
He is currently an Associate Professor of me-
chanical engineering and the Associate Chair for
Graduate Affairs in the Department of Mechan-
ical and Aerospace Engineering at the Missouri
University of Science and Technology (formerly
University of Missouri Rolla), Rolla. His research
and teaching interests include the areas of modeling,
analysis, monitoring, and control of manufacturing
11
processes and alternative energy systems and has over 100 technical refereed
publications.
Dr. Landers was a recipient of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ M.
Eugene Merchant Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award in 2004.
He is a member of ASEE and ASME and a senior member of SME. He is cur-
rently an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEM
TECHNOLOGY, the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Con-
trol, and the ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering.