Force Loading Tracking Control of an Electro-Hydraulic Actuator Based on a Nonlinear Adaptive Fuzzy Backstepping Control Scheme

In this article, a nonlinear adaptive fuzzy backstepping controller combined with an adaptive backstepping controller and an adaptive fuzzy controller is proposed for real-time tracking control of an electro-hydraulic force loading system. Firstly, a nonlinear dynamic model for the electro-hydraulic force loading system is built with consideration of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. Then, the adaptive backstepping controller is employed to obtain desired control output for the force loading control system considering parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. Furthermore, an adaptive fuzzy control scheme is designed to adjust uncertain control parameters based on adaptive fuzzy system to cope with the chattering condition that results from the overwhelming external disturbances. The stability of the overall system with the proposed control algorithm can be proved by Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, an electro-hydraulic force loading experimental system with xPC rapid prototyping technology is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear adaptive fuzzy backstepping controller. Experimental results verify that the proposed control method exhibit excellent performances on force loading tracking control of the electro-hydraulic force loading experimental system compared with a conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller with velocity feedforward and adaptive backstepping control schemes.