In this paper, a combination of nonlinear gain and proportional integral derivative (NPID) controller was proposed to the trajectory tracking of a pneumatic positioning system. The nonlinear gain was employed to this technique in order to avoid overshoot when a relatively large gain is used to produce a fast response. This nonlinear gain can vary automatically either by increasing or decreasing depending on the error generated at each instant. Mathematical model of a pneumatic actuator plant was obtained by using system identification based on input and output of open-loop experimental data. An autoregressive moving average with exogenous (ARMAX) model was used as a model structure of the system. The results of simulation and experimental tests conducted for pneumatic system with different kind of input namely step, sinusoidal, trapezoidal and random waveforms were applied to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique. The results reveal that the proposed controller is better than conventional PID controller in terms of robust performance as well as show an improvement in its accuracy.

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