Analysis and Modeling of the Dynamic Behaviour of the McKibben Artificial Nuscle

摘要

The McKibben artificial artificial muscle is a pneumatic device, behaving in a certain manner by analogy with skeletal muscle, which has been recently applied to Robotics. Robot-arms actuated by antagonistic McKibben muscles present a true natural compliance under the form of a passive joint compliance induced by the actuator. Tasks involving a contact of the robot with its environment or needing a cooperation with the human operator are potential applications of these robot-arms. However the actuator is hard to control because of a large hysteresis cycle characterizing the open-loop relationship between muscle presure and joint position. We presume the friction between yarns of the muscle wave to be responsible for this actuator hysteresis. We develop in this paper an analysis of the frictional muscle behaviour. A 3-parameters friction model is proposed and validated. Such model would be useful for a better understanding of the McKibben muscle and its use in Robotics.