Prescribed performance control for MDF continuous hot pressing hydraulic system

In this paper, a prescribed performance control scheme is proposed for medium density fibreboard (MDF) continuous hot pressing hydraulic system. The performance issues regarding transient and steady state behaviours are explicitly considered in the control design and analysis. Firstly, a special error transformation is introduced into the first subsystem to transform original system with performance constraints into an equivalent ‘output constrained’ one to achieve prescribed performance guarantees. Subsequently, based on an appropriately designed barrier Lyapunov function (BLF), a controller is designed to stabilise the transformed system. Meanwhile, the novel error transformation effectively facilitates the control law derivation. It is proven that the proposed controller is capable of guaranteeing the satisfaction of the specific constraints on the transformed error and hence the prescribed performance specifications on the position tracking error, as well as the bounds of all closed-loop signals. In particular, in the second step of controller design, a first-order filter is used in conjunction with the traditional backstepping control to eliminate the differential term expansion caused by the derivative of virtual control input. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to authenticate and validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.