Control of a fluidic muscle system using Neuro Active Force Control

The paper describes a neuro active force control (NAFC) method that is applied to control a vertical moving mass (trolley) actuated by a fluidic muscle or pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM). The NAFC is in effect coupled to a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller and was practically implemented on a physical test rig that was developed in the laboratory. The effectiveness of the proposed controller was verified through the experiments, which suggests its superior performance in terms trajectory tracking control capability and disturbance suppression.