Recording apparatus and control method

A recording apparatus comprising:

• a light illuminating/receiving unit which is configured to cause an optical disc recording medium to be illuminated through a common object lens with recording light and ATS light for adjacent track servo and to receive reflected light of the ATS light from the optical disc recording medium;
• a rotation driving unit which drives the optical disc recording medium to be rotated;
• a tracking mechanism which drives the object lens in a tracking direction which is a direction parallel to a radial direction of the optical disc recording medium;
• a tracking error signal generation unit which generates a tracking error signal indicating an error of an illumination spot position of the ATS light with respect to a mark sequence recorded on the optical disc recording medium based on a light-receiving signal of the ATS light obtained by the light illuminating/receiving unit;
• and
• a tracking servo controller which performs tracking servo control on the object lens by driving the tracking mechanism based on the tracking error signal,
• wherein the tracking servo controller is configured to include:
• a servo calculation unit which performs servo calculation based on the tracking error signal in a feedback loop as a tracking servo loop;
• and
• a feed forward controller which calculates an estimated value of a control target value of the tracking servo control of the tracking servo controller based on an estimated value of the illumination spot position of the ATS light obtained by performing a first filter process emulating a transfer characteristic of the tracking mechanism on an output signal of the servo calculation unit and a value of distance between the illumination spot position of the recording light and the illumination spot position of the ATS light and which applies a control signal, which is generated by performing a second filter process on the estimated value so as to suppress a transfer characteristic gain of the tracking servo loop to be equal to or less than 0 dB (decibel) in the entire frequency band, to the tracking servo loop;
• wherein the feed forward controller includes a phase characteristic improving processing unit having at least a pre-reading memory unit which causes the estimated value of the illumination spot position of the recording light obtained by adding the value of distance between the illumination spot position of the recording light and the illumination spot position of the ATS light to the estimated value of the illumination spot position of the ATS light of an elapsed predetermined time to be storable and which sequentially reads the estimated values of an elapsed time of less than the time of one rotation of the optical disc recording medium among the stored estimated values, the phase characteristic improving processing unit generating a phase characteristic improving signal for suppressing the phase delay of the frequency-phase characteristic of the tracking servo loop when the second filter process is performed on the output of the phase characteristic improving processing unit;
• and
• wherein the feed forward controller is configured to perform the second filter process by using a value of the phase characteristic improving signal as an estimated value of the control target value.