Application of robot arm using fiber knitted type pneumatic artificial rubber muscles

In the restoration work from disasters, the remote control of construction machine is required to ensure the worker's safety. However, conventional remote-controlled construction machine is larger than ordinary ones and limited in types and numbers, so there is a problem that the transportation to the destructed sites takes time and is troublesome. We have been developing the pneumatic humanoid type robot arm, which can be installed in any models of construction machine. In consideration of portability, the lightweight fiber knitted type pneumatic artificial rubber muscle (FARM) was adopted as the actuator. In this paper, we developed the static and dynamic characteristic models of the FARM taking the effect of elasticity of rubber and frictional force into consideration. Then we realized the remote control of the construction machine using the pneumatic robot that has 6 degree of freedom using the FARM. Moreover, we did some experiments on the remote control of the construction machine. Experimental results show that the developed system is available in remote control of a construction machine.