A Nonlinear Controller for Pneumatic Servo Systems: Design and Experimental Tests

This paper is dedicated to the problem of pneumatic cylinder control without pressure measurement. Based on the theory of homogeneous, finite-time stable, ordinary differential equations, a state-feedback nonlinear controller is proposed. The closed-loop system stability is proved and an attraction domain of the controller is given. The performances and the effectiveness of the proposed controller are illustrated against an experimental setup consisting of a pneumatic cylinder controlled by a dSPACE dS1103 microcontroller.