14-DOF PNEUMATIC DUAL MANIPULATORS BASED ON 2-DOF PNEUMATIC ACTUATOR AND ITS EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION BY BALL-HANDLING CONTROL

摘要

Robots utilized in the fields of welfare or agriculture should be light in weight and flexible in structure. 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 and unexplosive. In this paper, a new structure of the pneumatic actuator with two-degree-of-freedom is proposed. By combining these proposed pneumatic actuators, multi-degree-of-freedom pneumatic manipulatorcan be easily constructed, and a fourteen-degree-of-freedom pneumatic dual manipulators was constructed. The performance of the proposed dual manipulators is confirmed through experiments for ball-handling with impedance control. The results show that the flexibility of the pneumatic actuator is appropriate to accomplish the coordinate motion of the right and left arms of the robot.