“…Mechanical bearings (e.g., sliding and especially rolling bearings) are commonly used in these precision motion stages due to their large motion range, high off-axis stiffness, and cost-effectiveness [1]. However, they experience nonlinear pre-motion (i.e., static) friction which adversely affects their positioning precision and speed, causing large tracking errors, long settling times, and stick-slip phenomena [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Compensation methods are often used to mitigate the undesirable effects of pre-motion friction, including high-gain feedback [5], model-based feedforward, and feedback controllers [4,7,9,10].…”