Passivity based Control of Antagonistic Tendon-Driven Mechanism

The paper presents a passivity-based control law for an antagonistic tendon-driven mechanism. It is proven, by using the passivity theorem, that the proposed control law is able to achieve two properties such as the passivity of interconnected subsystems when the external torque is applied and the global asymptotic stability during free motion when the external force is absent. The proposed controller is simple to be implemented for a complex tendon-driven mechanism because it requires only gravity compensation. In addition, it brings a robustness to the entire control system. And finally, the control strategy can be treated as one of the impedance control schemes so as to achieve the desired performance efficiently.