Adaptive control of hydraulic actuators with LuGre model-based friction compensation

This paper concerns high-accuracy tracking control for hydraulic actuators with nonlinear friction compensation. Typically, LuGre model-based friction compensation has been widely employed in sundry industrial servomechanisms. However, due to the piecewise continuous property, it is difficult to be integrated with backstepping design, which needs the time derivation of the employed friction model. Hence, nonlinear model-based hydraulic control rarely sets foot in friction compensation with nondifferentiable friction models, such as LuGre model, Stribeck effects, although they can give excellent friction description and prediction. In this paper, a novel continuously differentiable nonlinear friction model is first derived by modifying the traditional piecewise continuous LuGre model, then an adaptive backstepping controller is proposed for precise tracking control of hydraulic systems to handle parametric uncertainties along with nonlinear friction compensation. In the formulated nonlinear hydraulic system model, friction parameters, servovalve null shift, and orifice-type internal leakage are all uniformly considered in the proposed controller. The controller theoretically guarantees asymptotic tracking performance in the presence of parametric uncertainties, and the robustness against unconsidered dynamics, as well as external disturbances, is also ensured via Lyapunov analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated via comparative experimental results.