Abstract: The researching history of pneumatic positioning system is overviewed, and the researching work on characteristics study, developing control valve and control strategy are summarized. The past work shows that the gas flow through a valve and tube is complex, the thermodynamic process in a cylinder chamber is a polytropic process with varying polytropic exponent and the friction force varies while the velocity of the cylinder and the pressures in the two chambers of the cylinder change. After the control valves are developed, the control strategies coped with different kinds of characteristics of the system are promoted, such as nonlinearity compensation strategy, dithering compensation, robust control and same pace PWM. After about 20 years researching, the pneumatic positioning systems now have performances good enough to meet the requests of the manufacturing system.

Key words: Basic characteristics, Control strategy, Pneumatic positioning system, Research development