Force Control of Pneumatic Actuators Utilizing a New Pressure Estimation Technique

In this paper, a new method of estimating the pressures needed to control the force output of a pneumatic cylinder is presented. A sliding mode force controller, encapsulating the dynamics of the system, is developed in order to implement and validate the pressure estimation. Experiments were conducted in order to measure the accuracy of the pressure estimation against that of the actual pressures. The results presented show that the estimated pressures accurately represent the actual pressures of the system.