Kalman Filter Based Approach to Overcome Elastic Saturation and Pneumatic Disturbances in Tele-Operated Soft Actuators

摘要

This paper presents a novel technique to overcome disturbances (elastic saturation/pneumatic) in slave side of tele-operable gesture control soft actuator using a Kalman filter (KF) based approach. The experimentation setup is consisting a master side (MS) that tracks human finger movements. Slave side (SS) is a pneumatic soft actuator made from an elastomer material. Duplex communication is established using MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) server. In this research, KF is implemented in SS to overcome elastic saturation and other disturbances occurred due to pneumatic control devices. MS tracks the index finger movement of the human operator using a Data Glove (DG) and sends the bending angles via MQTT to SS. SS also tracks its bending angle using a flex sensor. We have previously encountered disturbances (seen in SS flex sensor) in the soft actuator (due to elastic saturation and pneumatic control). Therefore, we have used a discrete KF model to improve the real-time response of the soft actuator. This technique is tested in a vertical setup for gripping of a round shaped object and disturbances are studies under different conditions. The recorded disturbances/delays (as published in our previous findings) is significantly improved (error reduced by 19.06%) after introducing this approach.