Direct tuning of gain-scheduled controller for electro-pneumatic clutch position control

This study proposes a gain-scheduled controller with direct tuning for the position control of a pneumatic clutch actuator that is installed in heavy-duty trucks. Pneumatic clutch actuators are highly nonlinear systems and cannot be easily controlled. Industries require a simple controller design that is easy to understand and requires few trial-and-error calibrations. Therefore, we adopted a gain-scheduled proportional integral derivative (PID) control law, which is a well-known and easy-to-understand nonlinear control method. In this approach, a gain scheduler is expressed using polynomials composed of coefficient parameters and controlled object states. The unknown coefficient parameters of the polynomials are directly tuned from the controlled object input/output data without having to use a controlled object model. The proposed controller design procedure is simple and does not require system identification or trial-and-error tuning. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by an experiment using an actual vehicle. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for the position control of pneumatic clutch actuators