Control strategies for pneumatic servo drives

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Abstract
Loughborough University has had a long standing interest in the design and industrial application of pneumatic motion control systems. Significant research effort in this regard has been directed towards evolving software based real-time control strategies which accomplish servo controlled positioning while compensating for drive system non-linearities and time delays. The work has led to commercial products, the first of their kind worldwide, in which real-time control algorithms implementing the strategies design are executed within a microprocessor based motion controller, The control strategies have evolved from a series of research investigations and have allowed dramatic improvement in both static and dynamic performance to be achieved. This paper outlines the features of some of the control approaches investigated and present the results of evaluation studies relating to each approach. To allow a direct comparison of performance, for each strategy, the evaluations have been conducted: (a) by utilizing a single degree of freedom robot module chosen from a family of commercially available modules ((hich were also products of a parallel research study), (b) by selecting performance indices to quantify a given response, and (c) by partially automating performance evaluation so that statistically valid performance analysis can be achieved.

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