Air motors are increasingly being used in pneumatic related industries because of their advantages of low operating cost and low maintenance. The DSP controller and the backstepping sliding mode control method were utilized in this study to control an X-Y pneumatic table for tracking trajectory. Due to the effects of the compressibility of air, friction between the motor and ball screw table and the dead-zone effect caused by the proportional valve, the system will yield different responses even with the same inlet pressure and will chatter at low speed. Hence under certain conditions, this method of backstepping sliding mode control can be applied to achieve better results than with the PID controller, such as for tracking circle error and tracking error of the two axes. According to the results, a steady-state error of 0.5 mu m can be achieved. The proposed method of backstepping sliding mode control can accomplish accurate tracking circle trajectory performance, offering an improvement in the tracking error of more than 50% over that of the PID controller. (C) 2010 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
