Research on PID Controller of Excavator Electro-Hydraulic System Based on Improved Differential Evolution

Abstract

An electrical hydraulic control system (electro-hydraulic system) is thought to be a key component in excavator operation systems. Control methods with fixed parameters may not yield optimal system performances because a hydraulic system has various nonlinear uncertainties due to the leakage and compressibility of the fluid medium. Hence, a novel PID controller based on improved differential evolution (IDE) is introduced to excavator electro-hydraulic systems for interconnected hydraulic systems. The proposed algorithm not only adjusts the PID parameters of the different working conditions but also adjusts the scaling factor and crossover probability. Then, the proposed PID controller based on IDE and the excavator bucket control system are modeled and simulated on the MATLAB simulation platform. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed controller has better performance in settling time, rise time, and convergence speed compared to the PID controller based on standard differential evolution and the Ziegler–Nichols (ZN) PID controller with a novel object function. Eventually, the IDE-PID controller is assessed on a 23-ton excavator, and good transient behavior and trajectory accuracy are obtained in comparison to the SDE-PID controller.