Safe robot with artificial pneumatic muscle

The safety of humans working with robots is an important issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but fundamental limits to meet required safety have been met owing to the absence of compliance in the robot actuators. Pneumatic muscle is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve the joint compliance. Here, the joint compliance actuated by pneumatic muscle is actively utilized to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the authors present a novel approach to control compliance and position independently without affecting on the each other's performance using pneumatic muscles. The presented method is verified by experiments using a physical robot.