Sliding Mode Position Control of an Electro-Pneumatic Clutch System

This paper presents a nonlinear control synthesis to design a position controller for an electro-pneumatic Clutch By Wire (CBW) system. In order to achieve high reference tracking performance and meet stability specifications, the Sliding Mode Control (SMC) synthesis is applied for controller design. The dynamic model of the CBW system is shown and transformed into an appropriate coordinate system. In this way, the controller can be designed to provide the track of the reference signal with predefined dynamics and reduce the effects of the disturbances on the performance. Moreover a controller reduction possibility is proposed to decrease the code length, memory claim and computing costs for embedded applications. In the paper, the model representation, coordinate transformation, control design strategy and finally the experimental results on a complete clutch bench are demonstrated and evaluated.