Abstract
The McKibben Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs) are expected to endow the advanced robots with the ability of coexisting and cooperating with humans. However, the application of PAMs is still severely hindered by some critical issues. Focusing on the bionic design issue, this chapter in detail presents the design of a 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) human-arm-like manipulator. It takes the antagonized PAMs and Bowden cables to mimic the muscle-tendon-ligament structure of human arm by elaborately configuring the DOFs and flexibly deploying the routing of Bowden cables; as a result, the DOFs of the analog shoulder, elbow, and wrist of the robotic arm intersect at a point respectively and the motion of these DOFs is independent from each other for convenience of human-like motion. The model imprecision caused by the strong nonlinearity is universally acknowledged as a main drawback of the PAM systems. Focusing on this issue, this chapter views the model imprecision as an internal disturbance, and presents an approach that observe these disturbances with extended-state-observer (ESO) and compensate them with full-order-sliding-mode-controller (fSMC), via experiments validated the human-like motion performance with expected robustness and tracking accuracy. Finally, some variants of PAMs for remedying the drawbacks of the PAM systems are discussed.
Highlights
Advanced robots, especially the humanoids, are expected to be employed as cooperative robot for coexisting and collaborating with human and interacting with other robots [1] in the human-centered, complex, unstructured, and dynamic daily-living environment, using the tools and equipment designed for human to accomplish some complex tasks or to be adopted as the slave robot to facilitate the tele-manipulation because its human-like configurations is favorable for simplifying the motion mapping as well as improving the efficiency of a homogeneous master-slave system.Such an ideal humanoid robot must have muscle-like actuators, bionic musculoskeletal structure, and human-like motion patterns
If motors instead of Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs) are taken as the actuators of the robotic arm, it will be very difficult to make the DOFs of a spherical joint to intersect at a point, and the robotic arm will be offset and bulky because of the volume issue of the motors and reduction gears, which must be coaxially mounted on the axis of the DOF
The fSMC-ESO approach can adjust the air pressure of PAMs according to load variation; as a result, it is robust to the payload variation and at the same time keeps good performance of human-like motion
Summary
Especially the humanoids, are expected to be employed as cooperative robot for coexisting and collaborating with human and interacting with other robots [1] in the human-centered, complex, unstructured, and dynamic daily-living environment, using the tools and equipment designed for human to accomplish some complex tasks or to be adopted as the slave robot to facilitate the tele-manipulation because its human-like configurations is favorable for simplifying the motion mapping as well as improving the efficiency of a homogeneous master-slave system. This chapter will focus and highlight some insights on these topics
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