The demands on today’s production regarding progressive flexibility and cost reduction as well as resource-efficiency require new approaches in each part of a production line.
Nowadays, pneumatics is popular in various industries, in particular in automation technology, pneumatic actuators are widly used.
Future pneumatic linear drives have to realize fast point-to-point positioning with high accuracy and minimal sensor effort at minimum energy consumption. The use of an inexpensive, discrete distance measurement, instead of a costly continuous position sensor, represents a challenge for the controller design for point-to-point movements. The lack of continuous position information must be compensated by an intelligent control of the drive.
In this project, low-cost switching valves are used to control linear pneumatic drives. The aim of this project is to design an optimal control strategy for the valves in order to accomplish a point-to-point motion of the piston actuator. Here, time-optimal and energy-efficient positioning of the piston is required, which is robust against fluctuations in the supply pressure and changing load forces.
@InProceedings{Pfeffer16a, author = {Pfeffer, A. and Gl\"uck, T. and Kugi, A.}, title = {Soft Landing and Disturbance Rejection for Pneumatic Drives with Partial Position Information}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th IFAC Symposium on Mechatronic Systems \& 15th Mechatronics Forum International Conference}, year = {2016}, volume = {49}, number = {21}, month = {9}, pages = {559--566}, doi = {10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.10.661}, address = {Loughborough, UK}, issn = {2405-8963}, }