Pneumatic Soft Actuator for Human Assist Technology

In the coming advanced age society, an innovative technology to assist the activities of daily living of elderly and disabled people and the heavy work in nursing is desired. To develop such a technology, an actuator safe and friendly for human is required. It should be small, lightweight and has to provide a proper softness. We call such an actuator soft actuator. A pneumatic rubber artificial muscle is one of typical soft actuators, which is useful for the human assist technology. We have developed some types of pneumatic rubber artificial muscles and applied them to human friendly soft mechanisms and wearable power assist devices. Since these mechanism and devices directly act on the human body, the human friendliness is essentially important. A wearable power assist device is equipped to the human body to assist the muscular force, which supports activities of daily living, rehabilitation, heavy working, training and so on. In this paper, some types of rubber muscles developed and manufactured in our laboratory are introduced. A soft robot hand for wiping the human body and a parallel manipulator for the wrist rehabilitation are described as soft mechanisms. Further, a wearable power assist glove and a power assist splint for upper arm are shown. Some evaluations clarify the effectiveness of pneumatic soft actuator for an innovative human assist technology.