A low order adaptive control scheme for hydraulic servo systems

This paper deals with high-performance position control of hydraulics servo systems in general. The hydraulic servo system used is a two link robotic manipulator actuated by two hydraulic servo cylinders. A non-linear model of the hydraulic system and a Newton-Euler based model of the mechanical system were constructed and linearized. Controllers are implemented and tested on the manipulator. Pressure feedback was found to greatly improve system stability margins. Passive gain feedforward shows improved tracking performance for small changes in load pressure. For large changes in load pressure, active gain feedforward shows a slightly improved performance. Computed-Torque Control shows better performance, but requires a well described system for best performance. A novel Adaptive Inverse Dynamics Controller was tested and the performance was found to be similar to that of Computed-Torque Control, but without requiring any previous system knowledge.