Control Design for Electromagnetic Actuators Based on Backstepping and Landing Reference Governor

Electromechanical actuation systems are widely used in a variety of industrial applications. Several control challenges in these applications stem from the need to achieve the soft contact of the moving parts of the actuators, also known as soft landing where the main goal is to reduce the system noise and wear, and prevent the relevant parts from damage and breaking. In this paper we propose a control design which can be employed to guarantee the enforcement of the required soft landing constraints. Our design approach is based on an application of the landing reference governor which gradually adjusts a set-point to a nominal controller employing nonlinear inversion and backstepping techniques. The closed-loop Lyapunov function of the nominal controller is used to estimate and avoid high landing velocities. We consider a single-mass dynamic model of the actuator and report the corresponding simulation results.