Heave compensators are widely used in offshore equipments to decouple the load motion from the wave induced ship motion. Hydraulic transformer based heave compensator (HTHC) can better compensate the ship’s heave in comparison with passive heave compensators (PHC) under changing sea conditions, meanwhile the accumulators’ volume is decreased significantly. Here in this paper, some further discussions about HTHC are given on the aspects of prediction, controller design and energy saving through simulation. Results turn out that heave prediction based on sliding mode observer is better than the Luenberger observer based one; chattering can be reduced through back-stepping method. The controller is robust when the load is perturbed by uncertain forces, and energy consumption of HTHC is about 56% of the one in an equal-sized hybrid active heave compensator (HAHC) meanwhile its total installed power can be reduced by 70%.

The Hybrid Hydraulic-Electric Architecture (HHEA) was proposed in recent years to increase system efficiency of high power mobile machines and to reap the benefits of electrification without the need for large electric machines. It uses a set of common pressure rails to provide the majority of power hydraulically and small electric motors to modulate that power for precise control. This paper presents the development of a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test-bed for testing motion control strategies for the HHEA. Precise motion control is important for off-road vehicles whose utility requires the machine being dexterous and performing tasks exactly as commanded. Motion control for the HHEA is challenging due to its intrinsic use of discrete pressure rail switches to minimize system efficiency or to keep the system within the torque capabilities of the electric motor. The motion control strategy utilizes two different controllers: a nominal passivity based back-stepping controller used in between pressure rail switches and a transition controller used to handle the event of a pressure rail switch. In this paper, the performance of the nominal control under various nominal and rail switching scenarios is experimentally evaluated on the HIL testbed.

The bulldozer is a heavy-duty earthmoving machine used in ground surface profiling and soil manipulation. Tracking the desired surface gradients with the hydraulically actuated manipulator while compensating for the mobile base motion is important in high-performance surface grading and traction control. In this paper, we present an approach for surface elevation tracking control for earthmoving work done by bulldozers using inertial measurement units (IMUs) and roof mounted global navigation satellite system (GNSS) antennas. We use mapping between the desired surface profile and hydraulic actuator velocities using the elevation surface and its gradient, the mobile manipulator Jacobian, and mobile base pose estimation by the extended Kalman filter (EKF) framework. With the proposed method, a relatively simple low-level actuator space control scheme can produce sufficient accuracy in varying elevation requirements besides leveling work. In an experimental setup, flat and uneven surface profiles were followed with average errors below 2 cm computed using kinematics. An external GNSS survey gave a coarse verification of the actual surface profile, showing average errors below 4 cm. This paper demonstrates a blade controller on a heavy-duty tracked vehicle with high manipulator inertia, hydraulic dynamics, and body vibrations. The experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed method, also revealing the needs for further development.

Wheeled mobile platforms are important subsystems of heavy-duty working machines, but precise motion control of vehicles with multiple actuated wheels can be challenging, as linear controllers relying solely on velocity feedback could lead to excessive slippage of the wheels in face of varying terrain conditions. When aiming for more advanced control tasks as opposed to path-following, torque control of individual wheels could become necessary in order to distribute the traction effort in a desired fashion between each wheel. Studies on dynamic-model-based control of wheeled mobile robots concentrate on eletrically driven platforms that exhibit more linear behaviour than hydraulic drives, and dynamics of hydraulic motors are rarely addressed in the control design. In this paper, a model-based control design is pursued for a four-wheel vehicle actuated by in-wheel hydraulic motors, all independently controllable by high-bandwidth valves. Experiments on a heavy-duty mobile platform, equipped with wheel odometry, pressure transducers and satellite positioning, are conducted to study the feasibility of the proposed controller.

The bulldozer is a heavy-duty earthmoving machine generating tractive force between its tracks and ground to cut and push soil with an onboard blade. The productivity of the machine is determined by the amount of soil moved per hour, which is influenced by the travel speed and the amount of material carried by the blade. In this paper, we present a high-level controller for a hydraulic bulldozer to drive the machine’s track slip to a value corresponding to maximum soil removal power. The proposed system sets online reference signals for the blade elevation and track velocity to produce a smooth ground profile and high productivity. The primary traction control strategy manipulates the load on the machine by blade adjustments. When a track slip threshold is exceeded, track velocity control is used to limit the slip to the said value. A comparison to blade-only control strategy shows improvements in ground profile smoothness and productivity on uneven terrain without any prior knowledge of the worksite ground profile.

In recent years, many works focusing on improving motion tracking accuracy of hydraulic actuators have been done by developing nonlinear control algorithms. Model nonlinearity compensation, such as valve deadband, nonlinear friction force, and flow leakages, is one of the key points in the control design. However, the inherently nonlinear valve flow characteristic is usually treated as linear for simplicity, which might lead to undesirable flow rate deviation and reduce the tracking precision especially when the cylinder moves at a low speed. In this study, an online valve flow nonlinearity compensation method is developed to improve the motion tracking precision of hydraulic actuators. Specifically, polynomials are used to mimic the nonlinear valve flow characteristic between the valve control input, pressure difference, and flow. The coefficients in polynomials are synthesized based on the offline identification experiments while the lumped discrepancy is updated online in the proposed control design. The adaptive robust control approach is also used to develop the closed-loop motion controller, which can handle the parametric uncertainties and uncertain nonlinearities in the electro-hydraulic system. Comparative experiments are conducted on an independent metering system with a differential cylinder and the results show the improved tracking precision with nonlinear valve flow comparing to the linear one, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The tap water driven McKibben muscle possesses several merits of the water hydraulic system, including high flexibility, low weight, and high power density. These aspects enable the application of this muscle system to mechanical systems that require high cleanliness. However, the muscle shows strong asymmetric hysteresis characteristics depending on the applied load, which blocks its effective application. This study presents an appropriate modelling of the hysteresis characteristics of the muscle using an asymmetric Bouc-Wen model along with a control strategy, based on the model predictive control with servomechanism (MPCS). Subsequently, an inverse optimisation is proposed by applying an adaptive model matching to make the compensated system match the prespecified predictor to reduce the time-consuming routine for obtaining proper weight matrices in the evaluation function of the model predictive control. The numerical simulation results show that the proposed approach works well, and easier controller tuning can be achieved.

Typically, off-road construction machines are not equipped with suspensions at the wheel axles. This has led to alternative concepts that uses the working implement to mitigate the vibration transmitted to the cabin. The most common solutions are based on passive ride control (PRC) methods. A PRC usually requires a hydraulic accumulator and dissipating valves properly connected to the working hydraulics. In this way, the PRC is able to dissipate the fluid energy and damp the oscillations of the pressure inside the hydraulic actuators, with clear benefits on the machine vibration. This paper focuses instead on an active ride control (ARC) methodology, which controls the working hydraulic motion to counter-reach the machine vibrations, avoiding the use of an accumulator. The paper addresses the main challenge of designing the controller for the ARC for the reference case of a wheel loader. A high pass pressure filter control with pressure feedback is proposed for this application. The controller is first studied in a simulation model and then validated through experiments on a stock machine. The bandwidth limitation of the standard hydraulic system does not permit to achieve the same performance of a state-of-art PRC system considered as baseline. Notwithstanding, the experimental results on the proposed ARC shows significant improvements with respect to a case where no controller is used. Moreover, the proposed method could be applied with more effectiveness in hydraulic systems with higher dynamic response.

In this paper, a nonlinear model-based controller with parameter identification is designed for a rigid open-chain manipulator arm actuated by servovalve-controlled hydraulic cylinders. The arising problem in adopting model-based controllers is how to acquire accurate estimates of system parameters, with limited available information about either the hydraulic actuator parameters or manipulator link inertial parameters. The objective of this study is to identify both the rigid-body parameters of the links and the hydraulic actuator parameters from collected cylinder chamber pressure and joint angle data, while no a priori knowledge of these parameters is available. Same physical plant models are used for control design as well as for parameter identification. Experimental results show that the proposed nonlinear model-based control scheme results in acceptable Cartesian position tracking performance in free-space motion when using the identified parameters.

The lumped parameter approach based on equations describing of the physical behavior of the system still represents one of the most convenient way to simulate hydraulic control systems. The key advantages of this approach are given by its intrinsic simulation swiftness as well as the ease of deriving state space formulations for controller design purposes. However, the common limitation of lumped parameter models is the high level of simplification of for certain physical aspects. For the case of hydraulic control valves with complex geometry, the flow forces are usually one of the most difficult aspects to describe accurately. The present paper presents a lumped parameter model for counterbalance valves, which includes an accurate analytical approach to model the effect of the flow forces based acting on the valve poppet and piston. The model is based on a classic control volume scheme for the description of the flow through the valve, and it is coupled with a dynamic model for the descriptions of the motion of the moving parts inside the valve. The novelty of the proposed approach consists on the analytical description of the flow forces, which is based on fluid momentum considerations. After describing the modeling approach, the paper details the authors’ efforts for experimentally validate the model on the basis of tests performed on actual components. The comparison between simulation results and experimental data confirms the validity of the proposed model and also highlights the importance of accounting for flow forces while describing the operation of counterbalance valves, particularly for cases of high flow rates.

Anthropomorphic hydraulic manipulator arms are extensively utilized for moving heavy loads in many industrial domains, e.g., in off-shore, construction and mining. By equipping these manipulator arms with an additional 3 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) spherical wrist mechanism, the dexterity and working envelope of the manipulator can be increased. For versatile operations, the motion range for the hydraulic wrist actuators should be close to 360 degrees with high torque output, with a compact volumetric size. Although the wrist can provide a high power-to-weight ratio, the actuators also introduce significant non-linearities in their dynamic behaviors. The complex dynamic behavior combined with high loads yield significant challenges in closed-loop control design. In this paper, we design a novel subsystem-dynamics-based controller for a hydraulically actuated spherical wrist mechanism utilizing the virtual decomposition control (VDC) approach. The proposed 3-DOF wrist controller is designed to be modular; thus, it can be connected as an plug-and-play subsystem into our previously designed state-of-the-art controller for a 3-DOF hydraulic manipulator arm. Stability proof of the overall 6-DOF system is provided. Experiments with a full-scale commercial hydraulic manipulator arm equipped with the 3-DOF spherical wrist demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Pump control systems are widely used, because of their energy saving properties and their high efficiency. Nevertheless, pump control systems generally have a low accuracy, because of the nonlinear pump flow and other nonlinearities of hydraulic systems. Furthermore, due to the underlaying high order dynamics, pump control systems have low response times, which is one of the main drawbacks. Servo motor-pump direct driven systems are commonly used in today’s industry. The application of servo motor pumps allow a reliable performance with quick response times. For low speeds, however, servo motor pumps do not achieve a high accuracy due to the pump flow deviation. The goal of this paper is to present a controller for a servo motor-pump direct driven system, which improves the accuracy especially at low pump speeds. For that purpose, the controller uses a nonlinear flow mapping, which maps the desired pump flow and pump pressure to the voltage input for the motor-pump. Additionally, the controller uses a backstepping method, which tracks the position as a first step and regulates the pressure as a second step. Comparison experiments to a controller without nonlinear flow mapping show that the controller designed in this paper has improved performances and tracking accuracy.

The most common active heave compensated offshore cranes have hydraulic winch systems. This paper investigates an active/passive hydraulic winch system with variable-displacement motors and variable-displacement pumps. The paper addresses the challenges when the active motors are set with a low displacement. The active motor displacement is shown to have significant impact on the dynamics of the closed loop hydraulic system. The classical control strategy for this type of system do not address these challenges and will in certain situations have significantly reduced performance. Therefor, a new control method is presented that utilize the variable displacement of the pumps and motors for speed control and to improve dynamics characteristics. The new winch controller is tested in a high-fidelity simulation model and is shown to improve low speed performance, reduce winch speed limitations by up to 30%, reduce system peak pressure by approximately 20%, and reduce control error by approximately 30%.

This paper focuses on the low-level control of heavy complex hydraulic hybrids, taking stability and the dynamic properties of the included components into account. A linear model which can describe a high number of hybrid configurations in a straightforward manner is derived and used for the development of a general multiple input multiple output (MIMO) decoupling control strategy. This strategy is tested in non-linear simulations of an example vehicle and stability requirements for the low-level actuators are derived. The results show that static decoupling may be used to simplify the control problem to three individual loops controlling pressure, output speed and engine speed. In particular, the pressure and output speed loops rely on fast displacement controllers for stability. In addition, it was found that the decoupling is facilitated if the hydrostatic units have equal response. The low-level control of heavy complex hydraulic hybrids may thus imply other demands on actuators than what is traditionally assumed.

The noise in hydraulic machines presents itself as fluid-borne noise (FBN), structure-borne noise (SBN) and air-borne noise (ABN). FBN is caused by the unsteady flow produced by pumps and motors or the operation of digital hydraulics, and propagates through the system causing SBN, which in turn causes ABN. This article reports on a novel integrated FBN attenuation approach, which employs a hybrid control system by integrating an active feedforward noise attenuator with passive tuned flexible hoses. The passive hoses are tuned to cancel the high-frequency pressure pulsations, whilst the active controller is designed to attenuate the dominant harmonic ripples. Adaptive notch filters with a variable step-size filtered-X Least Mean Square algorithm were applied in the new designed active piezoelectric actuator with high preload and operating forces, a wide bandwidth and very good linear dynamics. A time-domain hose model considering coupling of longitudinal wall and fluid waves was used to model and tune the flexible hose. Very good FBN cancellation was achieved by using the proposed integrated control approach, which was validated by comparing with numerical simulation and experiments. It can be concluded that the active attenuator with passive flexible hoses can form an effective, cost-efficient and practical solution for FBN attenuation. As the problem of high noise levels generated by hydraulically powered machines has risen significantly in awareness amongst industry and the general public, this work constitutes an important contribution to the sustainable development of low noise hydraulic fluid power machines.

Hydraulic manipulators are extensively utilized to move heavy loads in many industrial tasks. In commercial applications, a manipulator base is required to rotate a motion range of the full 360°. This is usually implemented by using a hydraulic rack and pinion gear actuator. Due to the manipulator’s long reach and heavy loads, manipulator tip acceleration can produce significant torque to the rotation gear in free-space motion. Imposed by nonlinear dynamical behavior (involving, e.g., the gear backlash and actuator friction) added to high inertia, a system closed-loop control design becomes a challenging task. An advanced closed-loop control enables to increase the automation-level of hydraulic manipulators. This study designs a novel subsystem-dynamics-based controller for a hydraulic rack and pinion gear actuator utilizing the control design principles of the virtual decomposition control (VDC) approach. An adaptive backlash compensation is incorporated in the control design. Furthermore, the proposed controller is implemented in previously-designed state-of-the-art hydraulic manipulator control. The stability of the overall control design is proven. Experiments with a full-scale commercial hydraulic manipulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive backlash compensation and the overall control performance.

This paper proposes a novel architecture for the pilot stage of electro-hydraulic two-stage servovalves that does not need a quiescent flow and a torque motor as well as a flexure tube to operate. The architecture consists of two small piezoelectric valves, coupled with two fixed orifices, which allow variation of the differential pressure at the main stage spool extremities in order to move it with high response speed and accuracy. Each piezoelectric valve is actuated by a piezoelectric ring bender, which exhibits much greater displacement than a stack actuator of the same mass, and greater force than a rectangular bender. The concept is intended to reduce the influence of piezoelectric hysteresis. In order to assess the validity of the proposed configuration and its controller in terms of spool positioning accuracy and dynamic response, detailed simulations are performed by using the software Simscape Fluids. At 50% amplitude the −90° bandwidth is about 150Hz.

As an effective approach to improving the fuel economy of modern heavy-duty vehicles, hydraulic hybrids have shown great advantages in off-road vehicles. Wheel loader is one of the representative vehicles in off-road applications as they are usually designed for single and repetitive task such as loading material. In a typical short loading cycle, there are many accelerations and decelerations, showing great hybridization potentials. Therefore in this paper a series hydraulic hybrid powertrain has been proposed for compact wheel loader since its hydrostatic powertrain can be easily transformed to a series hydraulic hybrid with an additional hydraulic accumulator. The modeling and system design of the series hydraulic hybrid wheel loader have been presented. Three controllers have been designed for vehicle speed control, engine torque control and engine speed control respectively. A dynamic simulation model has been developed in MATLAB/Simulink. A rule-based energy management strategy (EMS) has been proposed for the series hydraulic hybrid wheel loader. Two different EMS schemes were investigated and compared through simulation studies.

Energy-efficient motion control of hydraulic actuators is a challenging task. Throttle-free solutions have the potential for high efficiency. The main throttle-free approaches are pump-controlled systems, transformer-based solutions, and digital hydraulic solutions, such as switching transformers, multi-chamber cylinder and multi-pressure systems. This paper presents a novel solution based on a so-called digital hydraulic power management system (DHPMS). The DHPMS is freely rotating and a hydraulic accumulator is used for energy storage. In contrast to existing approaches, each actuator has its own DHPMS and a small accumulator to locally handle the power peaks. Only an average amount of power is needed from the hydraulic grid, radically reducing the size of the supply pump and the hydraulic piping and hosing. Pump flow is only 12.5% of the peak flow of the actuator in the case studied. Control of this type of system is challenging, and the model-based approach is used. The controller uses a simplified model and functionality is verified by using a detailed simulation model of the system. The results show that the approach is feasible but is demanding on the control valves. The system delay is also relatively long, which reduces the control performance in high-end systems. Nevertheless, this approach has potential in mobile machines, for example.

Teleoperated robotic manipulators can be used to remotely operate within hazardous, hard to reach or dangerous environments. In tasks requiring handling of heavy objects with high forces, hydraulic manipulators have remained the most practical solution. Contrary to the previous research on teleoperation of hydraulic manipulators based on linearization and linear control theory, the present study proposes a full-dynamics-based bilateral force-reflected teleoperation, designed between a multiple degrees-of-freedom (n-DOF) electrical master manipulator and an n-DOF hydraulic slave manipulator. The used teleoperation method allows arbitrary motion and force scaling between the n-DOF manipulators, effectively enabling the use of two greatly dissimilar manipulators. The proposed teleoperation system is demonstrated with a full-scale two-DOF hydraulic slave manipulator (having 475 kg payload attached to the tip) in a free-space motion task, and in a constrained motion task including both real and virtual constraints in the environment. Despite the inherent highly nonlinear dynamic behaviour of hydraulic systems and challenges in realizing a bilateral teleoperation, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed controller for full-dynamics-based teleoperation 1) can rigorously address the system nonlinearities, 2) can realize a high-performance bilateral teleoperation with hydraulic slave manipulators, and 3) is capable to operate in constrained motion with the environment having both real and virtual (i.e., artificially rendered) constraints.