Yasunori Ichikawa

Development of a low pressure driven pneumatic actuator and its application to a robot hand

This paper presents a non-metallic and light robot hand that uses balloon-type pneumatic actuators that we developed. Recently, there has been a lot of research into robot coexisting with people and helping them. Such robots must be proven safe for contact with people. The drive system of our proposed robot hand uses balloon-type pneumatic actuators that we originally developed in consideration of the safety measures required for human contact. The results of test on the characteristics of the pneumatic actuator proved that it is possible to drive a robot hand and create enough generated force to grasp objects using lower inner pressure and lower air volume. Moreover, a model the same size as a human hand can be made without a big air compressor, we also consider the applications of such prosthetic hands

Modeling and force control of membrane pneumatic actuators

Research and development in the robotics of rehab and power assistance have recently focused on pneumatically driven robots. This is because of their low cost, light weight, and a simple design. We are able to build safe and flexible drives. We took particular note of a Mckibben pneumatic actuator as a drive mechanism for pneumatically driven robots. We developed a low-pressure, low-volume pneumatic actuator in previous studies. However, the generative force of these actuators is small, when you use a equipment like that used for rehab assistance. We originally developed membrane pneumatic actuators to solve this problem. A five-fingered robot hand was developed, that imitated a humans right hand with membrane pneumatic actuators. First, we present the characteristics of a pneumatic actuator from our experiment. Then, we constructed a model using results from another experiment in a one-link arm with membrane pneumatic actuators. Next, a PI-D control system was constructed, and its gains were determined by simulation. Then, we tried to control the pressing force of a one-link arm with the controllers we constructed. As a result, we could control the pressing force with the constructed PI-D controllers.