A multi-switching mode intelligent hybrid control of electro-hydraulic proportional systems

Abstract

The electro-hydraulic proportional system is a highly non-linear system owing to the fact that the system is composed of components from different disciplines such as electric, hydraulic and mechanical disciplines. In general, a switching-based controller is suitable to the control of such a system. In this paper, a switching-based controller is proposed, which is called multi-switching mode intelligent hybrid control, for electro-hydraulic proportional systems. The novelty of the multi-switching mode intelligent hybrid control is that it integrates the PID control law, the neural-fuzzy control law, and the expert-based control law. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-switching mode intelligent hybrid control, both experiment and simulation were conducted. It is shown that the experimental result corresponds well with the simulation result. Further, the proposed control system was compared with the traditional ones such as PID and neural-fuzzy controller for a trajectory tracking task with an electro-hydraulic proportional, which shows that the proposed one is far superior to these traditional ones. Overall, there is evidence that the proposed multi-switching mode intelligent hybrid control is very effective. It is noted that though the idea of the switching-based control system to electro-hydraulic proportional systems may not be new, the specific integration of the member control laws along with specific control laws developed in this work to electro-hydraulic proportional systems is not reported in the literature and multi-switching mode intelligent hybrid control is potentially useful to other electro-hydraulic proportional systems.