Robust Position Control for a Pneumatic Cylinder

The main contribution of this paper is a robust and precise position control method based on sliding mode for a pneumatic cylinder. The controller is implemented on a DSP system. The main challenge is the higher accuracy than 10 mum, which can be ensured with wide range of variation of the load (disturbance) and pressure in the entire operation area. The paper describes the nonlinear model of the pneumatic cylinder and the three main design steps of the proposed control method, namely sliding surface design, control law selection and chattering free implementation. Finally, it presents experimental results