Adaptive sliding mode control with disturbance observer for a class of electro-hydraulic actuator system

Position tracking control has become one of the most popular studies in the control of Electro-Hydraulic Actuator (EHA) systems. However, it deals with highly nonlinear behaviours, uncertainties and external disturbances, which significantly affect the control performance. In the class of nonlinear robust control, Sliding Mode Control (SMC) has become an effective approach for systems experiencing these issues due to its discontinuous nature. But, employing SMC as a stand-alone controller may not be effective for EHA systems with time-varying external disturbance, and integration is needed. Hence, the objective of this study is to formulate and implement a robust SMC in adaptive control form integrated with Nonlinear Disturbance Observer (NDO) to guarantee robustness, position tracking accuracy, and smoothness of the control actions to an EHA system in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. The EHA system was modelled as a nonlinear system which contains nonlinearities, uncertainties and disturbances. The SMC was developed in integration with NDO, in which switching gain of the SMC is designed to be adaptive on the bounds of uncertainties and disturbances, and updated by the NDO through an adaptation mechanism. Stability of the SMC and the NDO are guaranteed by the Lyapunov function candidate. Simulation and experimental results show that capability of the integrated controller to improve the smoothness of the control actions is as good as the stand-alone adaptive SMC with varying boundary layers technique. Also, it is capable to maintain the tracking accuracy about 25% better than the stand-alone SMC. Integration of the NDO into the SMC offers a better compromise between position tracking accuracy and control actions smoothness in position tracking control technique based-SMC