In this paper, we investigate the limit cycle of a biped walker driven by pairs of pneumatic artificial muscles. We show, experimentally, that the period of the limit cycle changes when different control parameters are applied and estimate the relationship between the period and the parameters through trials. A step-by-step feedback controller is proposed to stabilize walking based on the estim...

Hard Exoskeletons and arm actuators have already been designed and available in industry but they are expensive, heavy and cumbersome so to reduce these drawbacks a low cost lightweight intelligent arm actuator has been designed, constructed and evaluated. It consists of a pneumatic artificial muscle, constructed using a football bladder and covered by parachute material to limit its expansion....

In care activity or rescue activity, hands that can grasp creatures are sometimes needed. Therefore, it is considered that the soft mechanism that uses pneumatic elements is useful to realize such hands. In this paper, we propose a new type of soft actuator (Sponge-Core-Soft Rubber Actuator) in which a sponge rubber is covered with silicon rubber. The structure of the sponge rubber is divided i...

A simulator is developed to model and design high strain shape memory alloy (SMA) tension actuators. The simulator may be used predict characteristics of a given actuator, or to design its geometry under speci cations such as force, speed, stroke and size. The accuracy of the model is veri ed experimentally in reference to an existing NiTi shape memory alloy prototype actuator. Having developed...

Introduction Pneumatic artificial rubber muscle (PARM) is a pneumatically driven actuator that provides mechanical effects similar in principle to those of muscle contraction. PARM is a novel actuator that has a high weight-power ratio and maximum contraction over the nominal length is 20%. As shown in Figure 1 , PARM is composed of a rubber tube impregnated with fibers. Teleoperation of pneuma...

Design and implementation of a unilateral teleoperated pneumatic system is presented followed by the stability analysis. The system consists of a pneumatic actuator that is subject to an environmental force and is navigated by a human-operated hand controller. Unlike many unilateral systems, the external force is entirely handled on the slave side using an impedance control scheme which adopts ...

Real physical plants for control experimentation are valuable tools in a control laboratory. This paper describes a prototype pneumatic active suspension system, which was designed and built over a number of years as a sequence of student projects. The physical plant, which models a quarter-car suspension, consists of a wheel, coil springs, a pneumatic actuator for active damping, position and ...

Recently, the rehabilitation devices using a soft pneumatic actuator for disabled are actively researched and developed because of the insufficient number of PT. In the previous study, the wrist rehabilitation device using flexible robot arm that consisted of three flexible pneumatic cylinders was proposed and tested. In this study, the wearable wrist rehabilitation device is proposed and teste...

In this paper a passive bilateral tele-operation between two pneumatic actuators is presented. The co-ordinated system is controlled to behave as a rigid mechanical tool that interacts with the human and other environment inputs. The input human forces when applied via a force sensor, can be amplified through the tele-operator to provide assistance for the human operator to perform the task eit...

ABSTRACT This paper presents an energetically derived control methodology to specify and regulate the frequency and amplitude of oscillatory motion of a pneumatic actuation system. A lossless horizontal pneumatic actuation system with an inertia is energetically shown to represent an oscillator with a stiffness, and hence frequency, related to the equilibrium pressures in the actuator. Followin...