Modified-PID Control With Feedforward Improvement For 1-Degree-Of-Freedom Pneumatic Muscle Actuated System

Over the past decade, pneumatic muscle actuators (PMA) has been receiving much attention due to the favorable advantages that PMA has to offer such as inherent compliant safety, compactness, dust-resistantand powerful, especially for rehabilitation application. However, the highly non-linear phenomenon exhibited by PMA poses a challenge in positioning control of the mechanism. Due to the highly nonlinear properties of the PMA system, it is difficult and challenge able to model the system accurately. Many advanced controls have been proposed, however, majority of them requires accurate model parameters for the design and/ or deep understanding of control theory. Therefore, this research aims to highlight a practical and simple control framework capable of providing ameliorated compensation towards the non-linearitiesin a PMA positioning system. The proposed controller is a combination of a modified PID control incorporated with a model-based feed-forward element. The modified PID control is cascaded with a modeled-nonlinear function and a linearizer that works to compensate the influence of the nonlinearities. The design procedure of the proposed control remains simple and none of the known parameter is required. The proposed controller is verified experimentally using the constructed test bed –1DOF PMA system;in point-to-point motion that driving in several step heights(5 mm, 10 mm, 20 mm, and 30 mm). At the step height of 30 mm, the proposed control has demonstrated three times smaller of overshoot and the reduction of 39% of settling time as compared with the conventional PID control. Overall, the experimental results show that the proposed controlleris capable of demonstrating a satisfactory transient, with better overshoot reduction characteristic and faster settling time; and robust performance under default and in the presence of the change of load, in comparison with the conventional PID control