A method of accurate position control with a pneumatic cylinder driving apparatus

In this paper, a method of accurate position control using a pneumatic cylinder driving apparatus is presented. To overcome the effect of friction force and transmission line, low friction type cylinder applied externally pressurized air bearing structure is used and two control valves attached both side of the cylinder directly. To compensate nonlinear characteristics of control valves, linearized control input derived from the relation between control input and effective area of control valve, and dither signal are applied to the valve. The controller applied to the pneumatic cylinder driving apparatus is composed of a state feedback controller and a disturbance observer. Experimental results show that the effectiveness of the proposed method and position control error of 5 μm accuracy could be obtained easily.