Adaptive Tracking Control of an Air Powered Robot Actuator

An adaptive controller is presented for a one-degree-of-freedom pneumatic actuator. The control law uses full-state feedback for simultaneous parameter identification and tracking control. For position control, a pneumatic actuator with high bandwidth is difficult to obtain because of the compressibility of air and the nonlinear characteristics of air flowing through a variable area orifice. Most previous controllers for gas powered actuators were relatively limited fixed gain or on-off type controllers with low tracking accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that tracking performance comparable to electric servomotors can be obtained using the algorithm presented despite the nonlinearities and compressibility of air