Towards high-speed, motion control of pneumatic actuators with low-cost valves

This article presents an active system for shock absorbing at the end positions of pneumatic cylinders as a first case study of high speed pneumatic motion control by standard switched valves. The problems tackled are self-tuning and adaptation in pneumatic systems. Despite having only discrete output signals, continuous adaptation is applied to fine-tune the system behavior and to cope with time-variant effects without an explicit process model. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the underlying method for high speed pneumatic control in this simplified case.