Real-Time Force Tracking Control of an Electro-Hydraulic System Using a Novel Robust Adaptive Sliding Mode Controller

This article focuses on a novel robust adaptive sliding mode control strategy of an electro-hydraulic force loading system with consideration of external disturbances and parameter uncertainties. To obtain the proposed controller, the nonlinear dynamic model of the electro-hydraulic force loading system is firstly provided, where external disturbances and system’s uncertain parameters are merged. Then, with consideration of external disturbances and parameter uncertainties, a robust adaptive sliding mode controller for the force control system is proposed and designed according to Lyapunov stability theory. The proposed controller has the merit of suppressing chattering phenomenon in traditional adaptive backstepping controllers when designing sign functions. In order to verify effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed controller, experimental studies are implemented on an electro-hydraulic force loading system by xPC rapid prototyping technology. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed controller exhibits more excellent performance on force tracking control in comparison of a traditional proportional-integral controller and an adaptive backstepping controller.