Modeling and control of an industrial hydraulic rotary vane actuator

In some high performance robot applications, the use of hydraulic rotary vane actuators is preferred. The use of such (industrial) actuators mostly involves the introduction of Coulomb friction due to seals. Besides that, the connections between the actuators and the loads are often flexible. Paying attention to these phenomena during the modeling of such an actuator, results in reliable linear and nonlinear models, which are very useful for control design (linear model) and for testing of the designed controllers (nonlinear model). Implementation of the designed controllers in practice proves the validity of the followed approach.<>