Accurate position control of PAM actuator in Lab VIEW environment

As an important driver element, the pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) is widely used in industrial applications for many automation purposes thanks to their variety of advantages. The design of a stable robust position controller for PAM is difficult since it is a very nonlinear time-variant controlled plant because of the compressibility of air, air mass flow rate through the valve, etc. The main contribution of this paper is a robust position control method based on sliding mode for a robot arm, driven by pneumatic muscle actuator. Finally, it presents experimental results.