Periodic motion control of a heavy duty pneumatic actuating table using low-cost position sensors and hybrid repetitive control

This paper aims to investigate the practicability of applying repetitive control related techniques to periodic up-and-down motion control of a heavy duty pneumatic actuating table. To alleviate the nonlinear effects in pneumatic actuator systems and make the implementation successful the study proposes a hybrid fuzzy-repetitive control method designed on the basis of an existing PID control closed loop system. A feedforward compensator, namely Zero Phase Error Tracking Controller, is added to improve the transient position errors. Different from the expensive optical laser sensors used in the previous literature, the study applies relatively low-cost linear position transducers as position feedback and still obtains satisfactory control performance. Experimental results on tracking a 1 mm and 0.1 Hz periodic motion profile demonstrate that the proposed hybrid control method provides faster convergence and smaller steady state errors comparing to some selected control methods.