Control of Artificial Pneumatic Muscle for Robot Application

Pneumatic muscle has many advantages such as elasticity, high power and structural similarity to a living thing's muscle. There has been many researches to control robot actuated by pneumatic muscles, but conventional theories are hard to apply on real robot plants because of their assumptions and disregards of pneumatic muscle's physical aspects like size of pneumatic muscle and its controller. Here, the new method for saving space which is occupied by many controllers to operate robot actuated by pneumatic muscles is proposed. Actually there is easy way to control pneumatic muscle using the commercial proportional pressure regulator, but its size is not suitable to be embedded on stand alone robot. So, new method using the pressure switches of compact size and encoders is suggested. This new method is tested on a robot link with ball joints, actuated by four pneumatic muscles