1. Introduction
As a complex nonlinear mechatronic system, electro-hydraulic servo system (EHSS) possesses many prominent merits such as fast response, strong load capacity, high power-to-weight ratio and so on [
1,
2,
3]. Because of these advantages, EHSS has been extensively used in modern industrial applications, such as digging robots [
4,
5,
6], hydraulic press [
7,
8], and mechanical arms [
9,
10], etc. Nevertheless, the EHSS in practical applications always suffers from various uncertainties. On one hand, the model parameters such as load mass, effective oil bulk modulus, leakage coefficient may significantly change with working conditions, temperature and equipment wear. On the other hand, the hydraulic system has strong nonlinearities in the flow and pressure dynamics of the control valve, oil compressibility, and leakage. Furthermore, owing to the intricacy of working environment, the EHSS is inevitably susceptible to unknown external load forces and disturbances. All these uncertainties could seriously deteriorate the system control performance, or even destroy the system. Therefore, the high-precision tracking control of EHSS in the presence of uncertainties with advanced control methods still poses challenges for engineers.
Over the past decades, there have been remarkable advancements on the control of EHSS. The existing control methods can be classified into three categories:
linear control [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17],
nonlinear control [
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29,
30,
31,
32,
33,
34], and
observer-based control [
37,
38,
39,
40,
41,
42,
43,
44].
The linear control algorithms, which are developed using conventional PID [
11,
12,
13,
14] or feedback linearization techniques [
15,
16,
17], are simple and easy to implement in engineering. However, they only perform well under certain operating conditions, and fail to achieve satisfactory performance in the presence of aforementioned uncertainties including parameter permutations, nonlinearities and disturbances. To enhance the control performance of EHSS, extensive research has been conducted, and numerous advanced nonlinear control methods have been proposed, such as backstepping control, adaptive control, sliding model control and so on.
The backstepping technique is one of the most powerful tools in nonlinear control, in which the control laws are designed recursively by constructing a serious of control Lyapunov functions. The distinctive feature of this approach lies in its well-defined step-by-step design procedure, and the system stability can be rigorously guaranteed by a Lyapunov stability theory. However, the control laws designed by this method depends on the accurate model of the system. To remove this obstacle, researchers often combine it with other advanced control methods such as adaptive control, fuzzy logic system (FLS)/neural network (NN) and sliding mode control (SMC). For example, a desired compensation adaptive control framework was proposed in [
18,
19], where a projection-type adaptive law was designed to estimate the unknown parameters. In [
20], an adaptive robust controller was developed by combining adaptive robust control with a discrete disturbance estimator, which can compensate for unknown parameters, nonlinearities and external disturbances. Unfortunately, the adaptive design process is usually required to be linearly parameterized with unknown constant parameters, which is not always satisfied for the complex EHSS. By employing FLS to approximate nonlinearities, parameter uncertainties and external disturbances, adaptive fuzzy backstepping controllers were presented in [
21,
22,
23,
24]. Similarly, taking advantage of the universal approximation ability of NN, adaptive backstepping NN control schemes have been extensively proposed in [
25,
26,
27]. However, the control algorithms using FLS/NN are usually computationally expensive, since FLS relies heavily on the knowledge rules of expert and NN requires either on-line learning or off-line training procedures to make the controller perform properly.
SMC is famous for its insensitivity to uncertainties in the manner of constructing a sliding mode surface. Once the system states reach the surface, the controller has strong robustness against uncertainties. In view of this excellent feature, several control strategies that combine backstepping and SMC have been proposed in [
28,
29,
30,
31] to improve the robustness of EHSS with backlash links, non-structural uncertainties or dead-zones. Furthermore, by incorporating NNs, adaptive NN sliding mode control approaches were presented in [
32,
33,
34] for EHSS to achieve a high tracking accuracy.
Observer-based control has been proved to be a powerful technique to address uncertainties. The basic idea of this methodology is to design an observer to estimate the uncertainties and compensate for the effect in the control loop. Typical observers include high-gain observer (HGO), nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO), adaptive observer (AO), sliding mode observer (SMO), and extended state observer (ESO). Among them, ESO is the most classical disturbance estimation method, which regards the internal and external disturbance of the system as an extended system state variable [
35,
36]. In [
37,
38,
39], three ESO-based sliding model controllers are proposed for EHSS, in which ESO is used to estimate the lumped disturbance while the convergence of the system state is guaranteed by SMC technique. In addition, employing ESO with backstepping, a variety of control strategies such as ESO-based finite-time backstepping control [
40,
41], ESO-based adaptive backstepping control [
42], and ESO-based backstepping robust control [
43,
44], have been proposed. Nevertheless, the ESO still has some drawbacks in the estimation accuracy and system convergence. It has been verified in [
45] that the structure of ESO can be equivalent to a Type-I tracking system, which means zero steady-state error convergence can only be achieved in the presence of constant disturbances.
According to the above literature review and analysis, it is evident that ESO-based control combined with SMC in the framework of backstepping is the most powerful and effective method for the control of EHSS in the presence of complex nonlinearities and uncertainties. However, the dynamics and disturbances of EHSS are dynamically changing, i.e., they are not constant. When employing the ESO-based backstepping sliding model control method, it faces challenging problems of low estimation accuracy and big estimation lag. Although increasing the ESO gains may improve the estimation accuracy, it would also amplify noises, leading to the so-called peaking phenomenon [
46,
47], or even system instability. Therefore, the improved backstepping SMC design based on the observer to handle this issue still needs further investigation. Recently, a novel compensation function observer (CFO) with a pure integral structure was proposed by Qi et al. in [
45]. By introducing velocity information and using a first-order filter or integrator as a compensation function, the CFO becomes a Type-III system, which enable it to estimate constant, slope and acceleration disturbances or uncertainties below with zero steady-state error. Due to these advantages, CFO was extensively applied to the attitude control of quadrotor aircraft [
48,
49], yielding favorable control outcomes. However, the application of CFO on EHSS has not been reported.
Motivated by the above observations, this paper exploits a novel CFO-based backstepping sliding model control (CFO-BMSC) approach to enhance the tracking accuracy of EHSS subjected to various uncertainties. The nonlinearities and disturbances of EHSS are first analyzed, and the model equation is rearranged as a appropriate form, where all the uncertainties affecting the system including unknown frictions, parameter perturbations and external disturbances are collectively treated as a lumped disturbance. Then, inspired by the unique feature of compensation function, a fourth-order CFO is employed to estimate the lumped disturbance accurately, which is in turn incorporated into the control design to compensate for the effect of the disturbance. Furthermore, in the framework of backstepping, a sliding model controller is designed to stabilize all the tracking errors. The primary features and contributions of the proposed approach are underlined as follows.
- (1)
Different from previous ESO-based methods (e.g., [
37,
40,
41,
43]), the CFO adopts a Type-III structure and fully utilizes system state information, which make it capable of estimating the disturbance with higher estimation accuracy. Detailed comparisons between the performance of ESO and CFO in estimation of different disturbances are examined by extensive comparison simulations.
- (2)
In comparison with conventional PID and ESO-based BSMC [
12,
47], the proposed CFO-BMSC tracks the reference trajectory with no phase lag under the influence of large external load forces and disturbances, and the tracking accuracy is increased by
and
respectively, obtaining better transient and steady-state tracking performances. To our best knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate CFO into the backstepping sliding mode control of EHSS.
- (3)
The stability of the overall system including the CFO and BSMC is rigorously analyzed by Lyapunov stability theory, which guarantees that the closed-loop control system is exponentially stable, and the tracking errors converge to the origin.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The nonlinear mathematical model of the EHSS under study is given in
Section 2. The control system design including compensation function observer, sliding mode backstepping controller, and the system stability analysis are presented in
Section 3. Simulation results with comparisons are shown in
Section 4, and conclusion remarks are finally given in
Section 5.
2. System Modeling and Problem Description
Figure 1 is the working principle diagram of the electro-hydraulic servo system (EHSS), which is consisted of an electro-hydraulic servo valve and a hydraulic cylinder. The load is controlled by an electro-hydraulic servo valve, which converts the received electrical signal into a hydraulic signal, and then drive the hydraulic cylinder. For the considered EHSS in
Figure 1,
m is the mass of the load,
A is the ram area of the chamber,
is the piston displacement,
is the servo valve spool displacement,
is the unmodeled friction and unknown disturbances in the systems,
is the pressure inside the left chamber of the hydraulic cylinder,
is the pressure inside the right chamber of the hydraulic cylinder,
is the supplied flow rate to the two chambers,
is the return flow rate to the two chambers,
is the supply pressure.
According to Newton’s second law, the dynamic equation of the hydraulic cylinder is
where
is the load pressure in the hydraulic actuator,
;
B is the coefficient of the viscous friction force. Considering the effect of internal leakages, the load pressure dynamics can be defined as [
19]
where
is the effective oil bulk modulus;
is the load flow,
;
is the coefficient of the total internal leakage of the hydraulic cylinder.
Given that the response of the servo valve is much higher than the hydraulic cylinder, the relationship between the spool displacement and the control input is approximated as
, where
is a positive constant. The load flow can be obtained [
19]
where
is the flow gain,
,
is the flow coefficient,
is the area gradient of the servo valve,
is the oil density.
Define
as the state variables, then from (
1)-(
3), the state-space equation of the EHSS is expressed as
where
Note that
and
are certain constants, both of which are related to the system parameters. In practice, it is often difficult to obtain accurate system parameters, so there exist uncertain parts for
and
, which can be denoted as
and
. The term
F includes unmodeled dynamics such as frictions and unknown external disturbances. In this paper, all the mentioned uncertainties are treated as a lumped disturbance
, which can be expressed as
Thus, the Equation (
4) is rewritten as
where
is the known nominal part of the EHSS model, and
is the unknown lumped disturbance. In this paper, an CFO is designed to estimate
in real time, and the estimate value is fed back to the controller to compensate for the effect of
such that the output
can track the desired trajectory
quickly and accurately.
4. Simulation Results and Analysis
To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed control scheme for the EHSS, two different working cases are simulated in the MATLAB/SIMULINK platform. The first case is to track an exponential trajectory with a relatively small disturbance, while the second case is to track a sinusoidal position trajectory with a large disturbance.
In all simulations, the system parameters such as coefficient of the viscous friction force
B and leakage coefficient of the system
are assumed to be perturbed, which result in the uncertain parts
and
in (
6) as:
and
. The nominal physical parameters of the EHSS are listed in
Table 2.
In addition, to illustrate the superiority of the proposed control approach, the following controllers are performed as comparison schemes.
-
(1)
CFO-BSMC: This is the proposed backstepping silding mode controller based on CFO presented in
Section 3. By trial and error, the parameters of the controller in (
26), (
30) and (
37) are selected as
,
=2000. The bandwidth of the proposed CFO in Remark 1 is chosen as
. Therefore, the gain parameters of the CFO are
.
-
(2)
ESO-BSMC: This is the backstepping silding mode controller based on the ESO proposed in [
47]. To ensure a fair comparison, the parameters of the controller are chosen as the same as those in CFO-BSMC. In addition, the poles of the ESO are assigned as the same as CFO, having the characteristic equation
, where
are gain parameters of the ESO. The bandwidth is also chosen as
, which results in
. Note that the maximum gainof the ESO is 240 times that of the CFO.
-
(3)
PID: This is the well-known proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller which has a wide range of application in industry [
12]. By trial and error, the gain parameters of the PID controller are tuned as
. It is notable that larger gains would achieve better tracking performance. However, it also may cause instability under the influence of lumped disturbances. Therefore, the gain parameters are ultimately obtained by the trial and error method.
4.1. Case 1: Tracking an exponential-position trajectory
In this case, the desired trajectory is selected as an exponential signal whose initial state is zero and steady state is 0.005 m, i.e., m, and a time-varying sinusoidal external disturbance N is imposed to the EHSS.
The simulation results of the EHSS under the three controllers are depicted in
Figure 3,
Figure 4,
Figure 5 and
Figure 6, which record tracking performance, the tracking errors, the estimation performance for the lumped disturbance, and the control input, respectively.
As seen from
Figure 3, the proposed controller achieves superior tracking control performance over the other two controller in the presence of parameter perturbations and time-varying sinusoidal disturbance. Specifically, by comparing the tracking error curves in
Figure 4 during the transient and steady stages, it is evident that the tracking error of PID controller fluctuates more seriously than that of ESO-BSMC, as well as CFO-BSMC. The reason for this is that the lumped disturbance can be estimated and compensated by both ESO and CFO. Furthermore, by examining the estimation curves of ESO and CFO in
Figure 5, it is apparent that CFO obtains a higher estimation accuracy than ESO under the same bandwidth.
Figure 6 exhibits that the control signals of the three controller are smooth, continuous and bounded. This group of simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed controller.
4.2. Case 2: Tracking a sinusoidal position trajectory
To further test the tracking performance of the proposed controller, a smooth sinusoidal desired trajectory is employed as sin() m. In addition, a large external disturbance is injected into the system to examine the robustness of the proposed controller. The disturbance is given as N, which is composed of a large constant load force and a large time-varying sinusoidal disturbance.
The output tracking performance of the three controllers is presented in
Figure 7. As seen, the three controllers are able to drive the output of the EHSS close to the desired trajectory. Furthermore, a comparative result of tracking errors is shown in
Figure 8, which indicates that the proposed CFO-BSMC has the smallest tracking error, followed by ESO-BSMC, and the worst is PID, which means the proposed controller achieves the best transient and steady state tracking performance. Moreover, by comparing the estimation performances between CFO and ESO in
Figure 9, it is evident that the ESO presents a phase lag in estimating the disturbance, while the proposed CFO can estimate the disturbance accurately. The smooth, continuous and bounded control signals are shown in
Figure 10.
In order to quantitatively analyze the control performance of the three controllers, three performance indices are introduced as follows [
18]:
(2) Root Mean Square Error:
(3) Integrated Time Absolute Error:
where
is the simulation step.
The obtained comparison results of the performance indices under the three controllers are presented in
Table 3. It is clearly seen that all the indices of the proposed CFO-BSMC are the smallest among the three controllers. More specifically, compared with PID and ESO-BSMC, the mean absolute error
of the proposed CFO-BSMC is increased by
and
, and the the root mean square error
is improved by
and
, respectively. These results verify that the proposed control approach achieves the best tracking accuracy. In addition, the integrated time absolute error
is to weight the tracking error by time, which represents the system insensitivity to initial error and sensitivity to the steady error. Oblivious, the
of the proposed controller is smallest, which means the proposed controller performs the best robustness against external disturbances.
The simulation results in this group demonstrate that even in the presence of large external disturbances and system perturbations, the proposed control method can effectively estimate the lumped disturbance and compensate for its effect, achieving a high-precision tracking control for sinusoidal trajectory.