Nonlinear model-based control of pulse width modulated pneumatic servo systems

This paper presents a control methodology that enables nonlinear model-based control of pulse width modulated (PWM) pneumatic servo actuators. An averaging approach is developed to describe the equivalent continuous-time dynamics of a PWM controlled nonlinear system, which renders the system, originally discontinuous and possibly non-affine in the input, into an equivalent system that is both continuous and affine in control input (i.e., transforms the system to nonlinear control canonical form). This approach is applied to a pneumatic actuator controlled by a pair of three-way solenoid actuated valves. The pneumatic actuation system is transformed into its averaged equivalent control canonical form, and a sliding mode controller is developed based on the resulting model. The controller is implemented on an experimental system, and the effectiveness of the proposed approach validated by experimental trajectory tracking.