Leader-Following Consensus of Multiple Electrohydraulic Actuators with Unknown External Disturbances

Abstract

This paper discusses the leader-following consensus problem of multiple electrohydraulic actuators (MEHAs) in which each electro-hydraulic actuator(EHA) has third-order nonlinear dynamics and unknown external load. Firstly, by using input-output feedback linearization techniques, each EHA model is linearized into an integral chain model. Then the poles of each EHA linear model are configured to improve the stability of the MEHAs. To track the leader and compensate the unknown external load, a distributed controller combined with the disturbance observer is constructed. Through the Lyapunov technique, the controller achieves that the tracking error between the EHAs and the leader is ultimately uniformly bounded and exponentially convergent, which goes to a small adjustable bounded set. Eventually, the effectiveness of distributed controller is demonstrated by both simulation and experiment.