Adaptive robust motion trajectory tracking control of pneumatic cylinders

High-accuracy motion trajectory tracking control of a pneumatic cylinder driven by a proportional directional control valve was considered. A mathematical model of the system was developed firstly. Due to the time-varying friction force in the cylinder, unmodeled dynamics, and unknown disturbances, there exist large extent of parametric uncertainties and rather severe uncertain nonlinearities in the pneumatic system. To deal with these uncertainties effectively, an adaptive robust controller was constructed in this work. The proposed controller employs on-line recursive least squares estimation(RLSE) to reduce the extent of parametric uncertainties, and utilizes the sliding mode control method to attenuate the effects of parameter estimation errors, unmodeled dynamics and disturbances. Therefore, a prescribed motion tracking transient performance and final tracking accuracy can be guaranteed. Since the system model uncertainties are unmatched, the recursive backstepping design technology was applied. In order to solve the conflicts between the sliding mode control design and the adaptive control design, the projection mapping was used to condition the RLSE algorithm so that the parameter estimates are kept within a known bounded convex set. Extensive experimental results were presented to illustrate the excellent achievable performance of the proposed controller and performance robustness to the load variation and sudden disturbance.