Development of a welfare machine with pneumatic actuator (1st report) -lifting machine using parallel mechanism-

摘要

It is estimated that twenty five percent of Japanese population will be elderly people over sixty-five in the year 2020. Under the present conditions, the development of a welfare machine is desired to assist a physically handicapped person and aperson of advanced age. Those machines, which are developed at the present, are usually a large system and occasionally difficult to manipulate them. The purpose of this study is to develop a compact, lightweight, multi-functions, easy manipulation andhuman-friendly welfare machine. The system consists of a lifting and transferring part. The lifting part was developed by using two 3-DOF (degree of freedom) parallel robots, which are driven by pneumatic actuators. In this paper, it was proved by theseexperimental results (position control, force control, cooperative control) that this system has a good potency in the welfare practical application.