A novel approach to pneumatic position servo control of a glass wall cleaning robot

Taking Shanghai Science and Technology Museum as the operation target, the robot named skycleaner which is totally actuated by pneumatic cylinders and is sucked to the glass walls with vacuum suckers is presented. In order to solve the problems of lower stiffness and the nonlinear movement characteristic of the pneumatic system, a method of segment and variable bang-bang controller is proposed to implement the accurate control of the position servo system using the principle of pneumatic pulse width-modulation (PWM). Testing results show that the controller can effectively improve the control quality. This implies that the method can meet the requirements of realization.