Design and control of a soft actuator driven by pneumatic muscles

To permit the growth of robotic systems into new applications, e.g. rehabilitation, wearable (exoskeleton) and domestic/service robots, new actuators that can safely interact with humans and environments are greatly required. This paper designs a pneumatically powered actuator that has intrinsic compliance, and is able to extend and bend. A discretization method is utilized to model the continuum shape of the actuator. The control strategy for such actuator are then presented to relate the actuator posture (including position and orientation) to its control inputs, i.e. supply pressures for the pneumatic muscles. Simulations and experiments were finally carried out to validate the model and prototype where good agreement was found between the two.