Abstract
Air powered servos are seldom explored for commercial control applications. They are mainly employed with programmable logic controllers in applications where positioning repeatability is of no importance. This paper examines the repeatability of an air powered load traverser under closed loop control. A set of controller gains is first determined experimentally based upon the desired response characteristics under various loading conditions. The repeatability of the control system is then determined statistically. The repeatability, under different start-stop positions and loading conditions is found to be less than ±0.3 mm. This value is within typical industries' requirement of ±1 mm and hence the system has great potential in many loading handling applications.
