Output Feedback Control of Uncertain Hydraulic Servo Systems

Most of the existing control methods for servo systems driven by hydraulic actuators have been developed by using a backstepping scheme and assuming that all system states (including internal hydraulic signals) are measurable. In this paper, we propose a new control design method for high-order servo systems with hydraulic actuator dynamics, where the backstepping scheme is avoided and only the system output (e.g., motion displacement) is required for the control implementation. For this purpose, the system model is first transformed into a canonical form, where the unknown dynamics in the system are lumped as one term. Then, we introduce a simple robust unknown dynamics estimator (UDE) that has only one tuning parameter but achieves exponential error convergence to accommodate the lumped uncertainties. Therefore, the function approximators (e.g., neural network and fuzzy systems) can be avoided, leading to reduced computational costs, simpler parameter tuning, and improved convergence as compared to backstepping methods. Extensive simulations and experiments based on a realistic test rig are conducted to show the efficacy of the proposed control.