Low air consumption control in pneumatic positioning system

The paper presents an idea of an open-loop control of a pneumatic positioning system consisting of a pneumatic cylinder, inexpensive measurement system and four on-off switching valves. A strategy of four pulses on-off control trajectory for implementation of a determined piston displacement without an overshoot is presented. Parameters for the control are determined by the application of artificial neural nets that have to be trained before the application. The strategy is nearly time-optimum one and results in a short control time, a quiet valves action and a significant reduction of the compressed air consumption in the comparison to algorithms used in pneumatic positioning systems. This way of control was investigated in many simulation experiments and in tests performed in a laboratory as well. It can be a basis for construction and development attractive, low-cost, economic pneumatic positioning systems.