Position control of flexible pneumatic cylinder using tiny embedded controller with disturbance observer

In the previous study, the flexible pneumatic cylinder was proposed and tested as a wearable actuator. The flexible robot arm using the cylinder for human wrist rehabilitation was also developed. In the next step, it is necessary to improve the control performance affected by disturbance such as a friction in a cylinder. In this paper, to realize a wearable, low-cost and robust control system, the position control system of the cylinder using a disturbance observer applied into the tiny embedded controller is proposed and tested. The position tracking control using the proposed system is carried out. As a result, it was confirmed that the proposed control scheme achieved 40% improvement of the mean absolute error in experiments.