Construction of 2-DOF Pneumatic Actuator based 14-DOF Pneumatic Dual Manipulators and its Experimental Evaluation by Ball Handling Control

摘要

Robots utilized in the field of welfare or agriculture should be light in weight and flexible in structure. A pneumatic actuator has properties such that it is more powerful compared with a motor of same weight, and that it is flexible, clean and unexplosive. In this paper we propose a new structure of the pneumatic actuator with two-degree-of-freedom. By using proposed pneumatic actuators, we can easily construct multi-degree of freedom pneumatic manipulators. Here we constructed a fourteen-degree of -freedom pneumatic dual manipulator. The performance of the dual manipulators is confirmed through experiments for ball handling with impedance control. In the experiments several control schemes, including decentralized and decoupling controls, were used. The results show that a flexibility of the pneumatic actuator is appropriate to accomplish the coordinative motion of the right and left arms of the robot.