Implementation of a Robot Actuated by Artificial Pneumatic Muscles

Abstract

Currently, most of robots are actuated by motors. Actuation using motors necessarily requires gears to increase their power, and gear has demerit of making noise and backlash effect. Motor is not suitable for robot having elastic motion either. On the other hand, pneumatic muscle has many advantages such as elasticity, high power and structural similarity to a living thing's muscle comparing with motor, so robot actuated by pneumatic muscles was developed to achieve pneumatic muscle actuator's merits even though developing PMR (pneumatic muscle robot) has many difficulties as followed. PMR's size is a little bit large because of pneumatic muscle actuator's large size, which makes it hard to apply on compact size robot. Pneumatic muscles' torque/force is still insufficient without appropriate method to increase its power to actuate robot legs, though its torque/force is bigger than motors with gears. Here developing a robot actuated by pneumatic muscles is described. Some techniques and details of configuration are explained