A study on tracking position control of an electropneumatic system using backstepping design

As an important driving element, the pneumatic cylinder is widely used in industrial applications due to its reliability, low cost and excellent performance in an industrial servo systems. However, along with the development of control technology, the requirement for control precision gets higher and higher. In many cases, in order to achieve the satisfied control performance, nonlinear control techniques are used. Backstepping is one of these nonlinear control techniques that has attracted a great deal of research interest in the last years. It is mainly applicable to strict-feedback system. This paper presents a new form of backstepping controller for an electropneumatic system. It should be noticed that the model of this system is not under strict-feedback form. Then, a modified methodology is proposed, synthesized and implemented on an experimental test bench. Experimental results are presented and discussed. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.