Practical and intuitive controller design method for precision positioning of a pneumatic cylinder actuator stage

The present paper describes a practical and intuitive controller design method for precision positioning of pneumatic cylinder actuator stages. Pneumatic actuators are easy to use and have numerous advantages, which has led to these actuators having a wide variety of applications. However, pneumatic actuators have notable nonlinear characteristics, which make precision positioning difficult to achieve. The purpose of the present study is to clarify a practical and intuitive controller design procedure for precision positioning of a pneumatic cylinder actuator. In addition to positioning performance, the present study focuses on the realization of easy controller design without the need for the exact model parameters or knowledge in control theory for general-industrial-use pneumatic cylinder actuators with friction characteristics. These considerations are important in order to fully exploit the advantages of pneumatic cylinder actuators in a wide variety of applications. As such, three elements are added to the conventional continuous-motion nominal characteristic trajectory following (CM NCTF) controller. A new design procedure of the improved CM NCTF controller for pneumatic cylinder actuator stages is introduced, and the positioning performance of the designed control system is examined experimentally under several conditions. The positioning results generally indicate a positioning error of 50 nm, which is equal to the sensor resolution.