Adaptive robust precision control of an active spray boom suspension with disturbance estimation

When the boom sprayer works in the field, the boom must be parallel to the undulating ground or crop canopy. Aiming at the problem of low control accuracy and poor stability caused by parameter uncertainties and time-varying disturbances in the electro-hydraulic active boom suspension system, this paper proposes an adaptive robust precision control algorithm based on disturbance estimation. Firstly, the dynamic analysis modeling method is adopted to establish the nonlinear dynamic model and mechanism geometric equation of the pendulum active and passive suspension. Then, the controller was designed based on the nonlinear model of the suspension system. The proposed controller uses the backstepping design method to integrate the disturbance observer into the adaptive robust controller, which can effectively deal with the parameter uncertainties and time-varying disturbances in the suspension system model. Finally, a large number of experiments were carried out by taking a 28 m large boom active suspension driven by a single-rod hydraulic pressure as an example. Using an established rapid control prototype of a large boom suspension, a variety of control algorithm comparison experiments were carried out, and a 6-DOF motion platform was used to simulate the motion coupling interference of the sprayer chassis. The experiment results illustrate the high-performance characteristics of the proposed controller and improve the tracking performance of the active pendulum suspension system under various parameter uncertainties and time-varying disturbances.