HYBRID ITERATIVE LEARNING CONTROL FOR POSITION TRACKING OF AN ELECTRO HYDRAULIC SERVO SYSTEM

Accurate position control of an electro hydraulic servo system (EHSS) is a challenging task due to inherent system nonlinearities, parametric variations and un-modelled dynamics. Since feedback controllers alone cannot provide perfect tracking control, an integration of feedback and feed forward controller is required. A cascaded iterative learning control (ILC) technique for position control of EHSS is proposed in this paper. ILC is a feed forward controller which modifies the reference signal for a feedback fractional order proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller by learning through current control input and previous error obtained through trails. Unlike other feed forward controllers, ILC works on signal instead of system which eliminates the need of complete knowledge of the system. As compared to other controllers, the proposed technique provides fast convergence without the need of reconfiguring the existing control loop. Simulation and experiments revealed the effectiveness of the proposed technique for EHSS. The obtained results indicated eight percent improvement in rise time and nearly twenty one percent improvement in the settling time.