Adaptive Sliding Mode Control for Hydraulic Drives: A New Approach

This paper presents a new adaptive sliding mode controller generally applicable for position tracking control of electro-hydraulic valve-cylinder drives (VCD’s). The proposed control scheme requires limited knowledge on system parameters, and employs only piston- and valve spool position feedback. The main target is to overcome problems with linear controllers deteriorating performance due to the inherent nonlinear nature of such systems, without requiring extensive knowledge on system parameters nor advanced control theory. In order to accomplish this task, an integral sliding mode controller employing parameter adaption through a recursive algorithm is presented. This is based on a reduced order model approximation of a VCD with unmatched valve flow- and cylinder asymmetries. Bounds on parameters are obtained despite lack of parameter knowledge, and the proposed controller demonstrates improved position tracking performance and robustness / adaptability compared with a conventional feedforward-PI controller, when subjected to perturbations in supply pressure and coulomb friction.