Hisashi Matsushita

Development of a Flexible Displacement Sensor Using Nylon String Coated with Carbon and Its Application for McKibben Actuator

The actuators for such a wearable device need to be flexible so as not to injure the body. The purpose of our study is to develop a flexible and lightweight actuator and a compact control device that can be safe and light enough to be attached to the human body. In this study, we proposed and tested a new type of flexible potentiometer using nylon string coated with carbon. As a result, we found that the tested sensor that can detect the displacement of the McKibben actuator so as not to lose the flexibility of the actuator

Development of a Bending Actuator using a Rubber Artificial Muscle and its Application to a Robot Hand

Recent years, with rapidly growing number of nuclear families, the homes which only have the married couple of senior citizen and elderly person of living alone are increasing. So the development of a human-friendly-robot which can take care of peoples daily life is strongly desired. This robot has to do works just like human, so it is needed to have a dexterous soft hand in the robot. Therefore, we have developed an artificial soft hand in our laboratory. This robot hand which has five fingers is made of silicone rubber. We can use this hand to achieve several works just like human hand. For example, it can grasp some objects that have the different shape and stiffness. Since it is made of silicone rubber, there is little damage to the object. In this study, we develop and produce a new type actuator, using a McKibben artificial muscle and flexible tube that can be used as a finger of the soft robot hand. Then we investigate the characteristics of the new type actuator. Finally, in order to examine the effectiveness of the proposed actuator, a master-slave system using the new actuator is tested

Development of Flexible Robot Arm Using Rod-less Type Flexible Pneumatic Cylinders

The purpose of our study is to develop a flexible and lightweight actuator which can be safe enough to be attached to the human body. Then, we proposed new types of flexible pneumatic actuators that could be used even if the actuator was deformed by external forces. Moreover, we tested rod-less type flexible pneumatic cylinders that could be moved by push-pull action, and applied the tested flexible cylinders as a rotary actuator. In this paper, we develop the flexible pneumatic robot arm as an application of that flexible pneumatic cylinder. We investigate several kinds of motion of the tested robot arm by using the master-slave type control system. Moreover, we develop the flexible pneumatic cylinder with a built-in position sensor

Design of a Controller for Pneumatic Suspension using a Disturbance Observer.

Our main purpose is to establish a pneumatic servo-type active suspension utilizing the vibration isolation function due to the effect of air compressibility. In this paper, we propose an approach to design of the controller using a disturbance observer, so as to suppress the pitching motion and the translational motion in the car body caused by the roughness of the road surface. This approach has the advantage that the controller for the two-wheeled vehicle model can be designed based on a single-wheeled vehicle model ignoring the interference between front and rear suspension. Also, it becomes easy to design the control parameters because the property of the disturbance suppression can be determined by a time constant of the filter. Some experimental and simulation results show the remarkable improvement of the pitching motion and the translational motion in the car body, and the applicability of this proposed control approach is confirmed.