Control of pneumatic servo system based on simultaneous pressure observing on both sides of the cylinder by high-Gain observer

Nonlinear factors such as air compressibility, leakage and friction make the control of pneumatic systems complex. Model-based robust control strategies are appropriate candidates for pneumatic systems, however in such controllers the measurement of state variables of the system are needed. In a pneumatic system the state variables are position and velocity of the actuator, and pressure in both sides of the cylinder. Pressure measurement is usually obtained by means of costly and low response sensors. A better way to deal with the measurement problem is to use observers to reconstruct the missing velocity and pressure signals. However the problem in a pneumatic system is that the system is not observable and pressure signals could not be observed by means of position signals only. To deal with this problem, in this paper, the pneumatic actuator is modeled as two separate chambers and the resulting subsystems are observable independently. High gain observers are designed for mentioned subsystems and for each chamber the pressure of the other chamber is considered as a disturbance. The input signal for each observer is the actuator position signal only. Finally a sliding-mode control strategy is designed for position tracking and experimental results verify that both controller and observer objectives are satisfied.