Predictive Functional Controller with Reduced-Order Observer Design for Pneumatic Positioning System

The pneumatic system is a type of actuator system widely used in industries that involve a movement of control in their applications. However, the usage of the pneumatic system in industries was limited to only certain applications since it always has problems associated with its accuracy. Due to nonlinearities and uncertainties in the system itself, accurate positioning control for the pneumatic system is very difficult to achieve. Thus, a suitable controller must be designed to deal with these issues. This paper proposes designing a reduced order observer for predictive functional control (PFC) as a new method for controlling the pneumatic positioning system. In this study, the pneumatic system was represented by a third-order auto-regressive with exogenous input (ARX) model structure, which is based on a system identification technique. The simulation results obtained from MATLAB/Simulink proved that this new control method can be used to control the pneumatic positioning system used in this study. Comparison with full-order observer system also demonstrated that this new control method can provide a good transient response as performed by full-order observer system, which clearly shows the potential of this new method to control the pneumatic positioning system in the real-time experiment.