14-DOF PNEUMATIC DUAL MANIPULATORS BASED ON2-DOF PNEUMATIC ACTUATOR AND ITSEXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION BY BALL-HANDLINGCONTROL

摘要

Robots utilized in the fields of welfare or agriculture should be light in weight and flexible instructure. A pneumatic actuator is considered as a candidate of actuators realizing such robots,because it is more powerful compared with a motor of the same weight. It is also flexible, clean andunexplosive. In this paper, a new structure of the pneumatic actuator with two-degree-of-freedom isproposed. By combining these proposed pneumatic actuators, multi-degree-of-freedom pneumaticmanipulator can be easily constructed, and a fourteen-degree-of-freedom pneumatic dual manipulatorswas constructed. The performance of the proposed dual manipulators is confirmed throughexperiments for ball-handling with impedance control. The results show that the flexibility of thepneumatic actuator is appropriate to accomplish the coordinate motion of the right and left arms of therobot.