Design and realization of hybrid ACO-based PID and LuGre friction compensation controller for three degree-of-freedom high precision flight simulator

Three degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) high precision flight simulator is a type of key hardware-in-loop equipment in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. The conventional Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) is a widely used industrial controller that uses a combination of proportional, integral and derivative action on the control error to form the output of the controller. It is well known that the undesired phenomena caused by friction can lead to overall flight simulator performance degradation or instability. This paper presents a novel kind of hybrid Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)-based PID and LuGre friction compensation controller for 3-DOF high precision flight simulator. On the basis of introduction of the basic principles of ACO, the controlling scheme design for the 3-DOF high precision flight simulator is presented. Based on the popular LuGre friction model, a novel nonlinear friction compensation controller for 3-DOF high precision flight simulator is also developed. The proposed Lyapunov function proves the robust global convergence of the tracking error. The parameters tuning of PID can be summed up as the typical continual spatial optimization problem, grid-based searching strategy is adopted in the improved ACO algorithm, and self-adaptive control strategy for the pheromone decay parameter is also adopted. Modularization design is adopted in the 3-DOF high precision flight simulator. This software can process the position and status signals, and display them on the friendly interface. Double buffer mechanism is adopted in the communication protocol between lower Industrial Personal Computer (IPC) and upper IPC. The series experimental results have verified the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid ACO-based PID and LuGre friction compensation controller.