Abstract
Pneumatic linear peristaltic actuators can offer some potential advantages when compared with conventional ones. The low cost, virtually unlimited stroke and easy implementation of curved motion profiles are among those benefits. On the downside, these actuators suffer high mechanical stress that can lead to short service life and increased leakage among chambers during the actuator lifetime. One way to cope with this problem is to impose the force—instead of the displacement—between rollers, as this has been shown to improve the endurance of the hose while reducing leakage during the actuator lifetime. This paper presents closed control loop results using such a setup. Previous studies with linear peristaltic actuators have revealed that, although it is possible to reach zero steady state error to constant references with closed loop control, the dynamic response obtained is very slow. This paper is mainly focused on this topic, namely on the development of several control laws to improve the dynamic performance of the system while avoiding limit cycles. The new developed control law leads to an average time of 1.67 s to reach a 0.1 mm error band in an experiment consisting of a series of 16 steps ranging from 0.02 to 0.32 m in amplitude.
Highlights
Pneumatic systems have always been attractive for industrial environments due to their low cost, high power to weight ratio, high velocity, no overheat, explosion or contamination risk and non-generation of magnetic fields
From the several controllers considered in this work, the state feedback controller with integral action (SFCI) controller was the only one leading to a limit cycle
From the several controllers considered in this work, the SFCI controller was the only one leading whenever an integral action is present [31]
Summary
Pneumatic systems have always been attractive for industrial environments due to their low cost, high power to weight ratio, high velocity, no overheat, explosion or contamination risk and non-generation of magnetic fields. A PLPA comprises a hose compressed by two rollers that act as a piston and presents several advantages over conventional actuators: it is a potentially low-weight and -cost actuator, it has a virtually unlimited stroke and it can perform curved motion profiles. Another important advantage of a PLPA, as shown in [22,23] is that that the friction characteristic of such an actuator is not as nonlinear as their conventional counterparts, making the task of devising control laws significantly less complex.
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