Advances in Automatic Control

A special issue of Machines (ISSN 2075-1702). This special issue belongs to the section "Robotics, Mechatronics and Intelligent Machines".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2023) | Viewed by 5479

Special Issue Editors

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Machine Design, Poznan University of Technology, 60-965 Poznań, Poland
Interests: applied mechanics; machine design
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Machine Design, Poznan University of Technology, 60-965 Poznan, Poland
Interests: wheelchair; biomechanics; mechanic; kinematic; magnetorheological liquids; solid body dynamics; machine design
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Machine Design, Poznan University of Technology, 60-965 Poznań, Poland
Interests: machine modelling; torque; wheelchair

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Automation is the application of machines to tasks that were once performed by human beings or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term ‘mechanization’ is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labour with machinery, automation generally implies the integration of machines into a self-governing system. Automation has revolutionized the areas in which it has been introduced, and scarcely any aspect of modern life remains unaffected.

For this Special Issue, we invite experimental and theoretical contributions on automatic control research and seek to examine the advances in solutions and procedures that can provide enhancements in machine structures and their functionalities, even in new areas of application.

The scope of the proposed Special Issue includes (but is not limited to) the following topics:

  • Applications of automation.
  • Systems and control engineering.
  • Biomechanics.
  • Human movement analysis.
  • Design and implementation of custom software for automatics.

Dr. Jan Gorecki
Dr. Mateusz Kukla
Dr. Maciej Berdychowski
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Machines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (3 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

23 pages, 6767 KiB  
Article
Advanced Motor Control for Improving the Trajectory Tracking Accuracy of a Low-Cost Mobile Robot
by Luis Mérida-Calvo, Andrés San-Millán Rodríguez, Francisco Ramos and Vicente Feliu-Batlle
Machines 2023, 11(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/machines11010014 - 23 Dec 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2283
Abstract
Accurate trajectory tracking is a paramount objective when a mobile robot must perform complicated tasks. In high-speed movements, time delays appear when reaching the desired position and orientation, as well as overshoots in the changes of orientation, which prevent the execution of some [...] Read more.
Accurate trajectory tracking is a paramount objective when a mobile robot must perform complicated tasks. In high-speed movements, time delays appear when reaching the desired position and orientation, as well as overshoots in the changes of orientation, which prevent the execution of some tasks. One of the aspects that most influences the tracking performance is the control system of the actuators of the robot wheels. It usually implements PID controllers that, in the case of low-cost robots, do not yield a good tracking performance owing to friction nonlinearity, hardware time delay and saturation. We propose to overcome these problems by designing an advanced process control system composed of a PID controller plus a prefilter combined with a Smith predictor, an anti-windup scheme and a Coulomb friction compensator. The contribution of this article is the motor control scheme and the method to tune the parameters of the controllers. It has been implemented in a well-known low-cost small mobile robot and experiments have been carried out that demonstrate the improvement achieved in the performance by using this control system. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Automatic Control)
Show Figures

Figure 1

20 pages, 5077 KiB  
Article
Application of the Gray Wolf Optimization Algorithm in Active Disturbance Rejection Control Parameter Tuning of an Electro-Hydraulic Servo Unit
by Bingwei Gao, Hao Guan, Wei Shen and Yongtai Ye
Machines 2022, 10(8), 599; https://doi.org/10.3390/machines10080599 - 22 Jul 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1284
Abstract
A valve-controlled hydraulic cylinder system has the characteristics of uncertainty and time-variance, and the electro-hydraulic servo unit encounters shock, vibration, and other external interference when working, which seriously affect the stability of the valve-controlled hydraulic cylinder system. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce [...] Read more.
A valve-controlled hydraulic cylinder system has the characteristics of uncertainty and time-variance, and the electro-hydraulic servo unit encounters shock, vibration, and other external interference when working, which seriously affect the stability of the valve-controlled hydraulic cylinder system. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce an active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) into the electro-hydraulic servo control. However, there are many ADRC parameters, and it is difficult to set these only with expert experience. Therefore, we propose applying the gray wolf optimization algorithm (GWO) to the ADRC, to auto-tune the parameters and find the optimal solution. In addition, the advantages of the GWO in ADRC parameter tuning are proven and analyzed. The simulation and experimental results showed that the GWO algorithm had a faster mean time for parameter tuning and the smallest fitness value (integrated time and absolute error), compared to the particle swarm optimization algorithm and genetic algorithm. Moreover, a valve-controlled cylinder system, after parameter tuning by the gray wolf optimization algorithm, could accurately adjust the parameters of the auto-disturbance rejection controller, with a faster response speed, smaller overshoot, and better anti-disturbance ability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Automatic Control)
Show Figures

Figure 1

20 pages, 7904 KiB  
Article
Robust Reduced-Order Active Disturbance Rejection Control Method: A Case Study on Speed Control of a One-Dimensional Gimbal
by Fan Wang, Peng Liu, Meilin Xie, Feng Jing, Bo Liu, Yu Cao and Caiwen Ma
Machines 2022, 10(7), 592; https://doi.org/10.3390/machines10070592 - 20 Jul 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1041
Abstract
Usually, the order of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is equal to the relative order of the plant. To improve the control performance, a robust reduced-order method for ADRC is investigated in this paper. Firstly, frequency domain analysis shows that the lower-order extended [...] Read more.
Usually, the order of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is equal to the relative order of the plant. To improve the control performance, a robust reduced-order method for ADRC is investigated in this paper. Firstly, frequency domain analysis shows that the lower-order extended state observer (ESO) has a smaller disturbance estimation error, so disturbance attenuation capability can be improved by reducing the order of ADRC. However, using only reduced-order ADRC will worsen the robustness of closed-loop systems. Therefore, a robust ADRC method based on a modified noise reduction disturbance observer (MNRDOB) is proposed. The main role of the MNRDOB is to improve the control performance of the closed-loop system by modifying the structure of the controlled object. In addition, the robust stability of the closed-loop control system based on the MNRDOB is discussed. Moreover, some simulations are used to demonstrate the robustness and noise suppression effects of the compound control method reduced-order ADRC with MNRDOB, and the parameter tuning method for the MNRDOB to improve the robustness of the system is given. Finally, some experiments on speed control of a one-dimensional gimbal are performed, and the results show that the proposed method is excellent in overshoot, tracking accuracy, and disturbance attenuation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Automatic Control)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop