I worked on this project in 2012-2014, being a postdoctoral member of the Robotics and Control Lab at Umeå University and under the supervision of professor Leonid Freidovich.
Mobile hydraulic drives are widely used in heavy-duty machines in mining, forestry, and agriculture. In contrast with stationary hydraulic systems, e.g., hydraulic presses, the mobile hydraulic drives are less automated. Most of such drives are nowadays controlled manually via a set of joysticks. In the Robotics and Control Lab, we have developed innovative solutions to automate mobile hydraulics: novel models of spool dynamics, velocity observers with time-varying gains, and a set of nonlinearity-inversion based controllers.
Experimental studies illustrated that these solutions significantly improve tracking performance, and our industrial colleagues, Ålö AB, highly appreciated the practical outcome of this researches.