Displacement controlled actuators offer a very promising alternative and energy saving solution for many applications in mobile machines, mobile robots and other applications. Here, the achievable system dynamics and thus the dynamics of the control element, the variable displacement pump, is often of great concern. It will be shown in this paper that electro-hydraulic pump control allows sufficiently high dynamics for this class of heavy duty actuators, which can in fact compete with conventional valve controlled systems.

Keywords: displacement controlled actuator, swash plate control, Ackermann parameter space method, rotary actuator