Intelligent control for accurate position tracking of electrohydraulic actuators

A novel intelligent control scheme is presented for accurate position tracking of electrohydraulic servo actuators. The proposed control law is designed by means of a non‐linear control approach and includes an adaptive neural network to provide the basic intelligent features. Online learning, instead of off‐line supervised training, is proposed to update the weight vector of the neural network. Moreover, the adoption of a composite error signal as the only input to the neural network allows a significant reduction in the computational complexity of the algorithm. Rigorous proofs for the boundedness and convergence properties of the closed‐loop signals are provided. Experimental results obtained with an electrohydraulic system demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed controller, even considering the highly non‐linear and uncertain plant dynamics.