Abstract
Hydraulic systems are commonly used in industry when large forces of torques are required. Increasing demands for positional, force and speed control from users have led to the use of closed-loop control techniques. While classical controllers are used successfully for many hydraulic applications, they cannot cope with the non-linearities inherent in hydraulic systems or the changes to system parameters over time. This paper considers these problems and proposes a solution in the form of a neural network-based controller in the forward path of the system directly controlling the hydraulic plant. A network-learning mechanism is also proposed to train the network to minimize the system error and examples are given of the implementation with comparisons against a PID controller. The examples illustrate the rapid convergence of the training algorithm and the robustness properties of a simple two-neuron, two-input network controlling a non-linear time-varying plant.
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