Extended State Observer-Based Chattering Free Terminal Sliding-Mode Control of Hydraulic Manipulators

Switching sliding-mode control strategy based on multi-type restrictive condition for voltage control of buck converter in auxiliary energy source

Hydraulic manipulators have highly non-linear dynamics. In this paper, the position tracking control of hydraulic manipulators is investigated. The model considers manipulator dynamics, hydraulic actuator dynamics, and the friction effect of the actuators. A control scheme using a high-order terminal sliding mode (TSM) control method is proposed. Two explicit TSM control laws are derived for position tracking control. Both control laws globally finite-time stabilize the tracking error system. Compared with the conventional control methods, the proposed high-order TSM control scheme can provide a faster convergence and a higher tracking accuracy. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In hazardous/emergency situations, public safety is of the utmost concern. In areas where human access is not possible or is restricted due to hazardous situations, a system or robot that can be distantly controlled is mandatory. There are many applications in which force cannot be applied directly while using physical sensors. Therefore, in this research, a robust controller for pursuing trajectory and force estimations while deprived of any signals or sensors for bilateral tele-operation of a hydraulic manipulator is suggested to handle these hazardous, emergency circumstances. A terminal sliding control with a sliding perturbation observer (TSMCSPO) is considered as the robust controller for a coupled leader and hydraulic follower system. The ultimate use of this controller is as a sliding perturbation observer (SPO) that can estimate the reaction force without any physical force sensors. Robust and perfect position tracking is attained with terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) in addition to control of the hydraulic follower manipulator. The force estimation and pursuing trajectory for the leader–follower system is built upon a bilateral tele-operation control approach. The difference between the reaction forces (caused by the remote environment) and the operating forces (applied by the human operator) required the involvement of an impedance model. The impedance model is implemented in the leader manipulator to provide human operators with an actual sense of the reaction force while the manipulator connects with the remote environment. A camera is used to ensure the safety of the workplace through visual feedback. The experimental results showed that the controller was robust at pursuing trajectory and force estimations for the bilateral tele-operation control of a hydraulic manipulator.

To meet the increased payload capacities demanded by present-day tasks, manipulator designers have turned to hydraulics as a means of actuation. Hydraulics have always been the actuator of choice when designing heavy-life construction and mining equipment such as bulldozers, backhoes, and tunneling devices. In order to successfully design, build, and deploy a new hydraulic manipulator (or subsystem) sophisticated modeling, analysis, and control experiments are usually needed. To support the development and deployment of new hydraulic manipulators Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has outfitted a significant experimental laboratory and has developed the software capability for research into hydraulic manipulators, hydraulic actuators, hydraulic systems, modeling of hydraulic systems, and hydraulic controls. The hydraulics laboratory at ORNL has three different manipulators. First is a 6-Degree-of-Freedom (6-DoF), multi-planer, teleoperated, flexible controls test bed used for the development of waste tank clean-up manipulator controls, thermal studies, system characterization, and manipulator tracking. Finally, is a human amplifier test bed used for the development of an entire new class of teleoperated systems. To compliment the hardware in the hydraulics laboratory, ORNL has developed a hydraulics simulation capability including a custom package to model the hydraulic systems and manipulators for performance studies and control development. This paper outlines the history of hydraulic manipulator developments at ORNL, describes the hydraulics laboratory, discusses the use of the equipment within the laboratory, and presents some of the initial results from experiments and modeling associated with these hydraulic manipulators. Included are some of the results from the development of the human amplifier/de-amplifier concepts, the characterization of the thermal sensitivity of hydraulic systems, and end-point tracking accuracy studies. Experimental and analytical results are included.

Manipulators are multi-rigid-body systems composed of multiple moving joints. During movement, the Coriolis force, centrifugal force, and gravity of the system undergo significant changes. The last three degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the wrist joint of a manipulator control the end attitude. Improving the command tracking accuracy of the wrist joint is a key challenge in controlling the end attitude of manipulators. In this study, a dynamics model of the mechanical arm–wrist joint is established based on the Lagrange method. An adaptive continuous robust integral of the sign of the error (ARISE) controller is designed using the reverse step method. Additionally, a linear extended state observer (LESO) is employed to estimate the time-varying interference existing in the system and compensate for it in the designed control rate. The stability of the Lyapunov function and the boundedness of the observer are proven. The proposed control method for the wrist joint is compared with other controllers on an experimental platform of multi-DOF hydraulic manipulators. The results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the control performance of hydraulic manipulators. The application of this method offers a new strategy and idea for achieving high-performance tracking control in hydraulic manipulators.

Electro-hydraulic position servo system of valve-controlled symmetrical cylinder (EPSSVCS) is a very important and widely used electro-hydraulic servo system, the performance of which is often affected by friction nonlinearity and external random disturbances together with unmodeled dynamic factors such as parameter uncertainty in practical work. To improve the tracking performance of the system, a backstepping sliding mode control algorithm (BSMC) based on an extended state observer was presented in this paper. Firstly, a nonlinear mathematical model of the EPSSVCS was established which takes into account the composite disturbance induced by the systematic friction nonlinearity, external disturbances and unmodeled dynamic factors. Then, an extended state observer (ESO) was designed which can effectively estimate the velocity, acceleration, and composite disturbance of the valve-controlled cylinder online. Furthermore, a kind of BSMC was presented based on the online ESO estimates and the displacement feedback signals. The control law was given and the system stability was proved. The analysis results showed that the output signal of the system can effectively track the input signal under the influence of typical external disturbances and unmodeled dynamic factors, which illustrated the effectiveness of the established nonlinear mathematical model and the stability of the designed control system. Moreover, by taking the parameters of the electro-hydraulic servo system of a certain type of CNC machine tool as a real example, the proposed algorithm (BSMC) was compared with the conventional PID control algorithm, the backstepping sliding mode control algorithm (BSC), and the adaptive robust control algorithm (ARC), and the results verified the superiority of the BSMC. This work may provide a useful reference for the research in the field of related control systems.

In this paper, the parameter robust design method and sliding mode control theory are combined to design the helicopter control system in the whole flight envelop with the uncertainties and nonlinearities considered. First based on the flying qualities and the constraint conditions of the measurable states, the partial pole assignment is realized by the parameter robust design method, accordingly the mapping relationship of the parameter space and the corresponding usable set is determined, which provides an effective method to design the equivalent scheduling control law in the whole flight envelop. Second based on the helicopter T -S model within the whole flight envelop, according to the parameter mapping law, the equivalent control law is designed using the parallel distributed compensation algorithm, which ensures the well dynamic performance the control system in the whole flight envelop. Finally the closed-loop system characteristic equation corresponding to the equivalent control law is used to construct the integral sliding surface. The switching is designed so that the system has the robustness against the uncertainties and disturbances. The simulations indicate that the proposed sliding mode control system is robust against the external disturbances, it has the strong disturbance-suppression capability and satisfies the dynamic performance requirements of the helicopter.

Electrohydraulic servo systems (EHSS) are used for several engineering applications, and in particular, for efficient handling of heavy loads. proportional-integral-differential (PID) control is used extensively to control EHSS, but the closed-loop performance is limited using this approach, due to the nonlinear dynamics that characterize these systems. Recent studies have shown that feedback linearization is a viable control design technique that addresses the nonlinear dynamics of EHSS; however, it is important to establish the robustness of this method, given that hydraulic system parameters can vary significantly during operation. In this study, we focus on supply pressure variations in a rotational electrohydraulic drive. The supply pressure appears in a square-root term in the system model, and thus, standard adaptive techniques that require uncertain parameters to appear linearly in the system equations, cannot be used. A Lyapunov approach is used to derive an enhanced feedback-linearization-based control law that accounts for supply pressure changes. Simulation results indicate that standard feedback-linearization based control is robust to EHSS parameter variations, providing significant improvement over PID control, and that the performance can be further improved using the proposed control law.

Valve-controlled asymmetric cylinder is widely used in servo loading system. As a kind of typical electro-hydraulic servo system (EHSS), it inherently has the characteristics such as high order nonlinear, strong coupling, and uncertain, therefore, conventional control strategy is difficult to satisfy the requirements of high-performance control. In this paper, a novel linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) method was proposed, in which the internal and external disturbances were actively estimated by the third-order linear extended state observer (LESO) in real-time, and rejected by the control law of proportional integral control (PID) with acceleration feed-forward. The stability of the proposed method was proved, and the influence rules of the LADRC parameters on the control performance were revealed by simulation. Finally, comparative experiments between LADRC and PID control were carried out, results showed that the disturbances can be effectively compensated and the control goals can be successfully achieved with the proposed method.

To solve the position tracking control problem of nonlinear and uncertain electrohydraulic servo systems, an adaptive terminal sliding mode control method based on the backstepping method was proposed. This method combines the adaptive control with the terminal sliding mode method. On the one hand, the proposed adaptive control law can effectively estimate and compensate the uncertain parameters of the electro-hydraulic servo system on line, on the other hand, with the variable coefficient reaching law obtained through introduction of the error attractor into the sliding mode reaching law, the designed terminal sliding mode control law can not only eliminate the non-singular term in the ordinary terminal sliding mode control law, but also greatly reduce the chattering of the sliding mode surface. Finally, according to the Lyapunov stability theory, the finite time stability of the position tracking error was proved strictly. The proposed method was compared with the integral backstepping sliding mode control and the linear sliding mode control. The simulation results show that, the proposed method has good robustness and tracking accuracy in position tracking control of electro-hydraulic servo systems.

Most current researches working on improving stiffness focus on the application of control theories. But controller in closed-loop hydraulic control system takes effect only after the controlled position is deviated, so the control action is lagged. Thus dynamic performance against force disturbance and dynamic load stiffness can’t be improved evidently by advanced control algorithms. In this paper, the elementary principle of maintaining piston position unchanged under sudden external force load change by charging additional oil is analyzed. On this basis, the conception of raising dynamic stiffness of electro hydraulic position servo system by flow feedforward compensation is put forward. And a scheme using double servo valves to realize flow feedforward compensation is presented, in which another fast response servo valve is added to the regular electro hydraulic servo system and specially utilized to compensate the compressed oil volume caused by load impact in time. The two valves are arranged in parallel to control the cylinder jointly. Furthermore, the model of flow compensation is derived, by which the product of the amplitude and width of the valve’s pulse command signal can be calculated. And determination rules of the amplitude and width of pulse signal are concluded by analysis and simulations. Using the proposed scheme, simulations and experiments at different positions with different force changes are conducted. The simulation and experimental results show that the system dynamic performance against load force impact is largely improved with decreased maximal dynamic position deviation and shortened settling time. That is, system dynamic load stiffness is evidently raised. This paper proposes a new method which can effectively improve the dynamic stiffness of electro-hydraulic servo systems.

This paper is concerned with the application of a robust control approach based on Sliding Mode Control (SMC) strategy with proportional integral switching surface in controlling the position trajectory of a hydraulic manipulator. This paper also addresses the suppression technique for the undesirable chattering phenomenon which usually occurs in SMC by replacing the discontinuous controller sign function with a proper continuous function. Chattering is unwanted because it leads to an excessive usage and damages the actuators and therefore the control law may become impractical. In this study, an integrated model of hydraulically actuated robot that considers both the manipulator linkage and actuator dynamics is used to provide a more suitable model for controller synthesis and analysis. The control technique is stable in the large based on Lyapunov theory. Its performance is evaluated and compared with the existing Independent Joint Linear Control (IJC) technique through computer simulation. The results prove that the controller has successfully force the robot manipulator to track the desired position trajectory for all times and has better performance than IJC.

In the paper we present results of theoretical and experimental research of properties of manipulators with electro hydraulic servo drives with energy sources of limited power. The danger of overloading the power sources and associated functional failures of the drive system are discussed. In order to solve the problem we propose a new structure of the control system and algorithms. This allows to effectively distribute available power between hydraulic drives. These control algorithms are based on a system with variable structure with actual fluid flow feedback. This paper presents analysis of the amplitude of the first harmonic and of oscillation frequency of the total flow in the steady state. This allows to give recommendations how to improve dynamic properties of a hydraulic manipulator. The proposed control laws solve the problem of coordination of motion of links of the manipulator for automatic distribution of power resources. Besides this, it creates favorable conditions for functioning of biotechnical system "human operator - hydraulic manipulator" with limited energy source.

There are various uncertain factors such as parameter perturbation and external disturbance during the steering process of a permanent magnet slip clutch electronically controlled hydraulic power steering system (P-ECHPS) of medium and heavy duty vehicles, which is an electronically controlled hydraulic power steering system based on a permanent magnetic slip clutch (PMSC). In order to avoid the immutable single assistance characteristic of a hydraulic power steering system, a PMSC speed-controlled model and P-ECHPS of each subsystem model were studied. Combined with non-singular terminal sliding mode and fast terminal sliding mode, an Adaptive Non-singular Fast Terminal Sliding (ANFTS) mode control strategy was proposed to control precisely the rotor speed of the PMSC in P-ECHPS, thus achieving better power control for the entire P-ECHPS system. The simulation results show that adaptive nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control enables PMSC output speed to track the target speed. Compared with the non-singular terminal sliding mode control and the ordinary sliding mode control, the convergence speed has been improved by 66.7% and 84.2%, respectively. The rapid control prototype test of PMSC based on dSPACE (dSPACE is a development and verification platform based on MATLAB/Simulink software.) was carried out. The validity of the adaptive NFTSM algorithm and the correctness of the offline simulation results are validated. The adaptive NFTSM algorithm have better robustness and can realize variable assist characteristics and save energy.

This paper develops a methodology for trajectory tracking control of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile manipulator with parameter uncertainties and external load changes. Based on backstepping technique, the proposed control law consists of two levels: kinematics and dynamic levels. First, the auxiliary kinematic velocity control laws for the mobile platform and the onboard arm are separately proposed. Second, a robust tracking control system based on hybrid sliding-mode fuzzy neural networks (HSMFNN) is presented to ensure the velocity tracking ability under dynamic uncertainties. To achieve the goal, a fuzzy neural network (FNN) controller is developed to act as an equivalent control law in the sliding-mode control, a robust controller is designed to incorporate the system dynamics into the sliding surface for guaranteeing the asymptotical stability, and the proportional controller is designed to improve the transient performance for randomly initializing FNN. All the adaptive learning algorithms of the proposed controller are derived from the Lyapunov stability theory so that the close-loop system tracking ability can be guaranteed no matter the uncertainties occur or not. Simulation results illustrate the feasibility as well as usefulness of the proposed control strategy in comparison with other strategies