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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Shihao, Li, Jiachen, Martin, Christopher, Chen, Zijun, Chen, Dongmei, Li, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.24259
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Table of Contents:
  • Precise tension control in roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing is difficult under varying operating conditions and process uncertainty. This paper presents a curriculum-based Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) controller for multi-section R2R tension control. The policy is trained in three phases with progressively wider reference ranges, from 27 to 33 N to the full operating envelope of 20 to 40 N, so it can generalize across nominal and disturbed conditions. On a three-section R2R benchmark, the learned controller achieves accurate tracking in nominal operation and handles large disturbances, including 20 N to 40 N step changes, with a single policy and no scenario-specific retuning. These results indicate that curriculum-trained SAC is a practical alternative to model-based control when system parameters vary and process uncertainty is significant.