A Globally Stable, Load-Independent Pressure Observer for the Servo Control of Pneumatic Actuators

Pneumatic actuators are governed by nonlinear dynamics. Thus, robust precision motion control of pneumatic systems requires model-based control techniques such as sliding-mode and/or adaptive control. These controllers typically require full-state knowledge of the system, i.e., pressure, position, velocity, and acceleration. For measuring pressure states, pneumatic servo systems require two expensive pressure sensors per axis, and hence, it makes the system economically noncompetitive with most electromagnetic types of actuation. This paper presents the development of a Lyapunov-based pressure observer for pneumatically actuated systems. The pressure observer is energy-based and has the useful feature of not requiring a model for the load of the system, i.e., it is load-independent. This pressure observer is proven to be globally stable with the added feature of having a response bandwidth equal to that of the modeled pressure dynamics. A robust observer-based controller is developed to obtain a low-cost precision pneumatic servo system. Experimental results are presented that demonstrate and validate the effectiveness of the proposed observer.