Adaptive Robust Tracking Control of Pressure Trajectory Based on Kalman Filter

When adaptive robust control(ARC) strategy based on backstepping design is applied in pneumatic servo control, accurate pressure tracking in motion is especially necessary for both force and position trajectories tracking of rodless pneumatic cylinders, and therefore an adaptive robust pressure controller is developed in this paper to improve the tracking accuracy of pressure trajectory in the chamber when the pneumatic cylinder is moving. In the proposed adaptive robust pressure controller, off-line fitting of the orifice area and on-line parameter estimation of the flow coefficient are utilized to have improved model compensation, and meanwhile robust feedback and Kalman filter are used to have strong robustness against uncertain nonlinearities, parameter fluctuations and noise. Research results demonstrate that the adaptive robust pressure controller could not only track various pressure trajectories accurately even when the pneumatic cylinder is moving, but also obtain very smooth control input, which indicates the effectiveness of adaptive model compensation. Especially when a step pressure trajectory is tracked under the condition of the movement of a rodless pneumatic cylinder, maximum tracking error of ARC is 4.46 kPa and average tracking error is 0.99 kPa, and steady-state error of ARC could achieve 0.84 kPa, which is very close to the measurement accuracy of pressure transducer.