Active Force Control of a fluidic muscle system using Fuzzy Logic

In this paper, active force control with fuzzy logic (AFCFL) technique is applied to the control of a fluidic muscle (also known as pneumatic artificial muscle or PAM) that acts as an actuator to drive a trolley system in a laboratory setting. Since, fluidic muscle has a high tension force, high power/weight ratio, high strength, and cleanliness, ease of maintenance, low cost, compactness and cheap power source, it has caught the attention of researchers in the area of robotics. Despite of its advantageous, the presence of the inherent high nonlinearity behaviour, high hysteresis and time variance in the system has made it a challenging and interesting system for modelling and control design. The main goal of this study is to perform accurate position control of a trolley through a hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) implementation so as to enhance the system performance through the AFCFL scheme. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller compared to the conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control method.