From Continuous Design to Delay-Aware Discrete Synthesis: Guaranteed High-Bandwidth Joint Control for PMSM Drives

Abstract

The increasing dynamic demands of modern robotic joints require current controllers to achieve high bandwidth over wide operating ranges of speed, acceleration, and torque, where communication, computation, and discrete-time effects can no longer be neglected. Conventional PMSM current controllers are typically designed in continuous time and subsequently discretized, leaving the sampling frequency and the impact of implementation delays largely to heuristic selection and iterative validation. This paper introduces a task-aware, delay-extended discrete-time joint model that explicitly accounts for physical communication and computation delays and enables direct synthesis of a discrete PI current controller with prescribed bandwidth and delay guarantees throughout the operating envelope. The framework analytically determines the minimum required sampling frequency, controller gains, and DC-link voltage needed to satisfy the specified motor and joint performance. Simulations across a range of dynamic requirements validate the methodology and demonstrate substantially reduced sampling-frequency and DC-link-voltage requirements compared with conventional continuous-time-based design. Experiments on a newly developed custom robotic joint further validate the proposed framework under real embedded implementation conditions.