Control Strategy of Hydraulic Servo Control Systems Based on the Integration of Soft Actor-Critic and Adaptive Robust Control

Abstract

High-flow hydraulic servo systems are extensively employed in contemporary industrial applications due to their considerable flow capacity and cost-effectiveness. Nonetheless, hydraulic servo systems frequently encounter unpredictable internal and external disturbances, and high-flow proportional directional valves always have unsatisfactory hydraulic characteristics, compromising the precision and robustness of high-flow hydraulic servo systems. This study proposes a novel control strategy integrating the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) reinforcement learning algorithm with Adaptive Robust Control (ARC) to enhance system performance. This approach features a two-tiered controller: the upper controller utilizes the SAC algorithm to learn and adapt to the dynamics of the hydraulic servo system, iteratively refining the lower controller's hyperparameters. Meanwhile, grounded in the ARC strategy, the lower controller executes realtime control of the hydraulic servo system. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy can effectively adjust the control hyperparameters according to the learned system dynamic and tracking errors. Consequently, this approach enhances control precision amidst varying external and internal disturbances. Moreover, this control strategy is anticipated to realize high-flow, high-precision, and high-robust hydraulic servo systems, which can be used in various fields such as marine and offshore engineering.