The observer-based neural network adaptive robust control of underwater hydraulic manipulator

Hydraulic system is widely used in industry where large actuation forces are needed such as electro-hydraulic positioning system, active suspension control, and so on. One of the main problem in hydraulic system is the nontriviality, for instance, the deadbands in valve operation, frictions of links, saturations, pressure dynamics, etc. both system unknown nonlinearities and external disturbances should be considered in controller design. For underwater hydraulic manipulator, because of the environment of sea and the large nonlinearities of the hydraulic manipulator system, both system unknown nonlinearities and external disturbances should be considered in controller design. A lot of control methods have been proposed to solve the problem properly, such as sliding mode control, adaptive control, fuzzy adaptive control, adaptive robust control, ect. However, due to limited knowledge about hydraulic manipulator system, it is hard to precisely estimate the nonlinearities for a possible higher performance. In this paper, a neural network adaptive robust control method is proposed to help control an underwater hydraulic manipulator. In order to achieve better performance using adaptive robust control strategy, unknown nonlinearities in the system are approximated by the outputs of radial basis function neural network (RBFNNs). A projection law has been used to bound the NN weights when they are tuning on-line to avoid possible adaptive divergence, and the tracking transient performance is guaranteed by robust control law. Simulation results illustrate that manipulator has a good tracking performance.