Design of an Electrohydraulic Positioning System Using a Novel Model Reference Control Scheme

A new model reference control method is presented for a linear, time-invariant system which may have multiple inputs and outputs. The design method is described in the discrete-time form using the Euler operator, which approaches the Laplace operator as the sampling interval aproaches zero. This method is applied to the positioning control of an electrohydraulic servo actuator and implemented using a personal computer in real time. The experimental results show that the plant response is significantly improved using the proposed method over the conventional output feedback method. The proposed method has potential applications to robots and other servomechanisms.