Recent advancement in controllability of digital hydraulic is similar to the performance of a proportional/servo hydraulic system, and several studies show that digital hydraulic will be an alternative for proportional/servo hydraulic. In this paper, tip point tracking of a single-link arm is taken as the subject of the study. Here, the single-link arm is controlled by a digital hydraulic system, which is established with parallel-connected on/off valves. In order to attain stepwise flow control, the pulse code modulation technique is used. By referring to the previous work, the control signal for the trajectory tracking is calculated by taking account of cylinder chamber pressure and velocity. But in this study, the required volume flow rate for trajectory tracing is taken into account for generating control signal. This approach improves the performance of the digital hydraulic system at lower velocity tracking and also reduces the computational complexity. The analysis is conducted with the proposed algorithm for 4-bit and 5-bit digital flow control units and tip point response of single link is presented. The results show that the 5-bit system has significantly better performance than the 4-bit system. In addition, the analysis is conducted with different stroke lengths such as 200, 100 and 50 mm for studying the behaviour of the system at lower velocity tracking. Better controllability is achieved at lower velocity tracking, and the results obtained with the proposed algorithm have nearly 2% tracking error. © The Author(s) 2019.