Front End Control Schemes for Pneumatic Servo-Driven Modules

Abstract

This paper describes an approach which can be used to improve the dynamic characteristics of pneumatic servo drives. The approach is based on an outer decision loop which modifies the command issued to an existing closed loop drive. This outer loop is designed to generate a set of initial (front end) control sequences at the start of any ‘point-to-point’ move. A learning procedure is also incorporated in the scheme to obtain an optimized set of control parameters which can produce a specified quality of response. The paper describes how the front end control scheme can be implemented in software, to improve the dynamic performance of microprocessor controlled pneumatically actuated robot modules which have been designed at Loughborough University and recently released in the UK market by Martonair Limited. Experimental results are presented which show that the scheme can improve the quality of response in terms of overshoot and positioning time.