Pneumatic Bellows Actuated Parallel Platform Control with Adjustable Stiffness Using a Hybrid Feed-Forward and Variable Gain Integral Controller

Redundant cascade manipulators actuated by pneumatic bellows actuators are passively compliant, rugged and dexterous, making them exceptionally well suited for application in agriculture. Unfortunately, the bellows are notoriously difficult to precisely position. This paper presents a novel control algorithm for the control of a parallel platform actuated by pneumatic bellows, which serves as a module of a cascade manipulator. The algorithm combines a feed-forward controller and a variable-gain I-controller. The mathematical model of the module, which serves as the feed-forward controller, was created by applying two simple regression steps on experimentally acquired data. The gain of the I-controller is linearly dependent on the total reference error, thereby addressing the prevalent problem of “a slow response or excessive overshoot”, which, in the described case, the simple combination of a feed-forward and constant-gain I-controller tends to suffer from. The proposed algorithm was experimentally verified and its performance was compared with two controllers: an ANFIS controller and a constant gain PID controller. The proposed controller has outperformed the PID controller in the three calculated criteria: IAE, ISE and ITAE by more than 40%. The controller was also tested under dynamic loading conditions, showing promising results.