A novel high-frequency resonance controllable pneumatic actuator and its high-precision motion trajectory tracking control

The strong nonlinearity and uncertainty of the pneumatic cylinder friction is one of the main reasons for the poor control accuracy of the pneumatic cylinder. For this reason, improving the friction characteristics of the pneumatic cylinder should contribute to the improvement of the pneumatic cylinder motion trajectory tracking accuracy. Reducing friction is a common method to improve the friction characteristics of pneumatic cylinders. In this paper, a novel longitudinal resonance friction-reducing pneumatic cylinder based on the principle of inverse piezoelectric effect is developed from the hardware perspective. Meanwhile, a promising adaptive robust controller (ARC) with online parameter identification and nonlinear robust control function is designed for the pneumatic position servo system from the software perspective. Finally, this paper focuses on exploring the possibility of further improving the accuracy by excitation of high-frequency resonance of the developed novel pneumatic actuator on the basis of the accuracy achievable at the software level (control algorithm). Experimental results show that friction reduction by means of high-frequency resonance can significantly improve the motion trajectory tracking accuracy of the pneumatic system. The maximum tracking error is reduced by 17.95% and 27.87% when tracking sinusoidal reference trajectories of 0.5 Hz and 0.25 Hz, respectively. The maximum tracking error is reduced by 15.79% when tracking a smooth square reference trajectory of 0.25 Hz. In addition, the designed controller is effective and robust to parameter variations and sudden perturbations.