A SDRE-based tracking control for a hydraulic actuation system

•A tracking control for a hydraulic actuator with hard nonlinearities is presented.•The tracking control consists of an SDRE-based feedback action and a feedforward one.•The feedback gains are obtained solving in real-time the algebraic Riccati equation.•The controller is implemented with a hand-coded C function for a real-time board.•The experimental results show the high performances of the proposed approach.

This paper presents the design and the experimental evaluation of a tracking control for a hydraulic actuation system in the presence of significant nonlinearities. The adopted control approach consists of a feedforward and a feedback term. The feedforward action is obtained from the known system dynamics and the feedback one is developed starting from the state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE).The tracking performance of the presented control is demonstrated by means of both simulations and real-time experiments, solving the algebraic Riccati equation at each time step.