Valve flow rate identification and robust force control for a pneumatic actuator used in a flight simulator

The present contribution deals with the development of a robust force controller for a pneumatic actuator that is employed in a flight simulator. Established control design techniques that deal with parametric uncertainties are applied and yield a control law which is tuned on a Rapid Control Prototyping system and implemented on a low-cost embedded system. The controller performance is evaluated for both systems using a test rig. Special emphasis regarding the experimental results is put on the effect of feedforward control in combination with offline trajectory generation. On top of that, a new concept for valve conductance identification is presented in this contribution. The novel approach reduces both computational expense and the effect of noise in analog sensors and outperforms the direct evaluation of the pressure dynamics equation.