Parameters Sensitivity Characteristics of Highly Integrated Valve-Controlled Cylinder Force Control System

Nowadays, a highly integrated valve?controlled cylinder(HIVC) is applied to drive the joints of legged robots. Although the adoption of HIVC has resulted in high?performance robot control, the hydraulic force system still has problems, such as strong nonlinearity, and time?varying parameters. This makes HIVC force control very diffcult and complex. How to improve the control performance of the HIVC force control system and find the influence rule of the system parameters on the control performance is very significant. Firstly, the mathematical model of HIVC force control system is established. Then the mathematical expression for parameter sensitivity matrix is obtained by applying matrix sensitivity analysis(PSM). Then, aimed at the sinusoidal response under(three factors and three levels) working conditions, the simulation and the experiment are conducted. While the error between the simulation and experiment can’t be avoided. Therefore, combined with the range analysis, the error in the two performance indexes of sinusoidal response under the whole working condition is analyzed. Besides, the sensitivity variation pattern for each system parameter under the whole working condition is figured out. Then the two sensitivity indexes for the three system parameters, which are supply pressure, proportional gain and initial displacement of piston, are proved experimentally. The proposed method significantly reveals the sensitivity characteristics of HIVC force control system, which can make the contribution to improve the control performance.

ADAPTIVE CONTROLLER AND ITS APPLICATION IN FORCE SYSTEM OF ASYMMETRIC CYLINDER CONTROLLED BY SYMMETRIC VALVE

Partial pressure, system vibration and asymmetric system dynamic performance exit in asymmetric cylinder controller by symmetric valve hydraulic system. To solve this problem in the force control system, model reference adaptive controller is designed using equilibrium point stability theory and output error equation polynomial. The reference model is selected in such a way that it meets the system dynamic performance. Hardware configuration of asymmetric cylinder controlled by asymmetric valve hydraulic system is replaced by intelligent control algorithm, thus the cost is lowered and easy to application. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive control sheme has good adaptive ability and well solves asymmetric dynamic performance problem. The designed adaptive controller is fairly robust to load disturbance and system parameter variation.

A rotary pneumatic actuator for the actuation of the exoskeleton knee joint

Rotary pneumatic actuators that are made out of linear one are always best suited for exoskeleton joint actuation due to its inherent power to weight ratio. This work is a modified version of knee actuation system that has already been developed and major modifications are made in order to make it more suitable for human wearing and also to reduce its bulkiness and complexity. The considered actuator system is a rotary actuator where a pulley converts the linear motion of the standard pneumatic piston into the rotary motion. To prove the capability of the actuator, its performance characteristics such as torque and power produced are compared to the required torque and power at the knee joint of the exoskeleton in swing phase and are found to be excellent. The two-way analysis of variance（ANOVA）is performed to find the effect of the throat area valve on knee angle. The ANOVA shows the significant effect of the throat area variation on the knee angle flexion made by the proposed actuator. A relationship between the throat area of flow control valve, that is connected to the exit port of the direction control valve, and angular displacement of the knee joint has been formulated. This relationship can be used to design a control system to regulate the mass flow rate of air at the exit and hence the angular velocity of the knee joint can be controlled.