The development of a fast, accurate, and inexpensive position-controlled pneumatic actuator that may be applied to a variety of practical positioning applications with various external loads is described in this paper. A novel modified pulse width modulation (MPWM) valve pulsing algorithm allows on/off solenoid valves to be used in place of costly servo valves. A comparison between the system response of standard PWM technique and that of the novel modified PWM technique shows that the control performance is significantly increased. A state feedback controller with position, velocity and acceleration feedback is successfully implemented as the continuous controller. Switching algorithm of control parameter using learning vector quantization neural network (LVQNN) is newly proposed, which estimates the external loads of the pneumatic actuator. The effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms are demonstrated through experiments with various loads.