Optimal Force Control and Analysis of Soft Pneumatic Actuator

Soft body parts provide increased adaptability and robustness, are highly compliant and exploiting the material properties can aid in faster and effective systems. For a robotic hand to achieve similar precision levels of a human hand, the robotic hand must not only perform an ideal grasp of the object in its work-space but must also include the competence to detect the slippage of the object in hand. While there is research on a control system for a soft gripper, there is almost none for a gripper actuated with asymmetric bellow flexible pneumatic actuator (ABFPA). This paper aims to design and implement a control system for a soft actuated ABFPA gripper that can detect and avoid slip autonomously by integrating sensors into a four fingered gripper actuated by ABFPA. Three modes viz. pick, hold and place are controlled with the aid of distance sensor, force sensitive sensor and flex sensor. These modes are extensively presented in this paper.