Adaptive Backstepping Control of a Pneumatic System With Unknown Model Parameters and Control Direction

The performance of the pneumatic elements and the micro-controller steadily increases as the price of them decreases. This trend promotes high performance tracking control research on pneumatic servo systems. However, it is very difficult to obtain exact model parameters, which is one of the main obstacles to design a high performance controller. Moreover, in some application cases, the control direction is undetermined because of the possible false or incorrect valve outlets connection. At the same time, the inaccuracy of the proportional valve zero points also degrades the tracking performance of pneumatic servo systems. In this paper, an adaptive backstepping control approach is proposed for a pneumatic position servo system considering unknown model parameters, unknown control direction, and inaccurate valve zero points. The proposed method combines the Nussbaum function and backstepping technique to design a position tracking controller of a pneumatic servo system with the aforementioned uncertainties. By using the Lyapunov method, the designed controller is proved to be stable, and the tracking error asymptotically converges to zero. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of the proposed approach as compared with some existing methods, even for negative direction case for which the other methods fail. The performance of the proposed controller is further improved by considering the proportional valve zero points.