Preliminary research on force transmission characteristic and control of tendon sheath actuation

摘要

Tendon sheath actuation has been widely applied in different kinds of robots, as it can provide remote power transmission and effectively simplify the overall mechanical structure of robot systems. However, there existing a lot of nonlinear properties which greatly degrade the transmission precision and control characteristics of tendon sheath actuation system. In this paper, a force transmission model is developed to study the characteristics of tendon sheath actuation system. Besides, a sliding mode control strategy is proposed based on the developed force transmission model in order to improve the force control accuracy. The validity and effectiveness of the transmission model and control strategy are demonstrated by several preliminary experiments. The experimental results indicate that the root mean square errors (RMSE) of the force tracking experiments with sinusoidal desired trajectories are about 0.685 N.