Real‐Time Fractional Control of an Electrohydraulic System Using Low‐Cost Technology

ABSTRACT Advances in control methods for electrohydraulic systems (EHS) improve performance by addressing nonlinearities and unknown parameters, although most studies are limited to numerical simulations. Furthermore, research with experimental validation often relies on high‐performance computing equipment, specialized data acquisition cards, and licensed software. While fractional‐order control offers a promising alternative, its real‐time implementation remains challenging due to the computational complexity of fractional calculus. To address this problem, this article describes the implementation of the real‐time closed‐loop control of an electrohydraulic system using low‐cost technology via a Raspberry Pi and Python code. A classic PID controller and a fractional order PID (FOPID) controller are executed to analyze their performance using the integral of the time‐weighted absolute error (ITAE). The controller gains and fractional exponents are optimized using genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) using a design objective function to ensure fairness in the performance comparison. In addition, system pressure disturbances and distance sensor failures are taken into account to analyze the stability and robustness of the proposed control strategies, using the ITAE criterion to evaluate the experimental performance in each case. The results showed that the proposed experimental setup, built on low‐cost technology, enables the implementation of real‐time closed‐loop control actions for various controllers and gain optimization methods, with the aim of obtaining experimental results that validate the superior performance of a particular control scheme.