Abstract
Due to the ageing and the decreasing birth rate in Japanese society, an important problem of providing nursing care for the elderly has occurred. Therefore, it is strongly desired to develop a wearable actuator to use in nursing care or rehabilitation. The purpose of this study is to develop a high-power flexible actuator which can be used in supporting a bathing. In this paper, we proposed and tested a rubber artificial muscle with the inner diameter sensor which consisted of two photo reflectors. The position control was carried out using the actuator with the built-in inner diameter sensor and the quasi-servo valve. As a result, the axial-direction displacement of the actuator could be estimated well by the tested inner diameter sensor, and a good position control performance was obtained. The large-scale bending actuator using the actuator with the built-in inner diameter sensor was also tested and investigated.
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