An artificial flexible robot arm based on pneumatic muscle actuators

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel human-friendly artificial flexible robot arm using four parallel-connected pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs). The PMA is a flexible silicone rubber actuator which has some behaviors nearest to the real biological muscle including translational and rotational motions. An inverse kinematic model for the motion control is also developed. Finally, from experiment results, it is proved that not only the axial contraction control of a single PMA but also the attitude control of the whole pneumatic flexible robot arm using PID controller are satisfactory.