Data-Driven Feedforward Force Control of a Single-Acting Pneumatic Cylinder with a Nonlinear Hysteresis Characteristic

Pneumatic force control has a broad application background in the automation field, such as in industrial polishing, robotic grasping, and humanoid robots. Nonlinear hysteresis characteristics are one of the major factors that affect the feedforward force control performance of a pneumatic system. The primary motivation of this paper is to develop an accurate feedforward actuating force control method for a single-acting pneumatic cylinder with a nonlinear hysteresis characteristic. A data-driven neural network modeling method is presented to achieve accurate actuating force modeling. The modeling accuracy of the neural network model under different configurations of the input layer is quantitatively analyzed to determine the essential modeling variables. The real-time execution speed of neural network models with different numbers of hidden neurons is evaluated to achieve a balance between the modeling accuracy and the real-time computing speed of the neural network model. Then, a single-acting pneumatic system is fabricated to experimentally verify the effectiveness of the proposed modeling and control method. The experimental results reveal that the actuating force can achieve ideal tracking of the target. In both the loading and the unloading process, the amplitude of the control error is less than 0.5 N. The overall RMS value of the control error is about 1 N. An instruction smoothing operation could reduce the percentage overshoot and steady-state error of the feedforward step actuating force control.