Adaptive simultaneous position and stiffness control for a soft robot arm

In this paper, an independent joint position and stiffness adaptive control for a robot arm actuated by McKibben artificial muscles is reported. In particular, muscular and dynamic parameters of the system are supposed unknown. Adaptive control performance is tested in a one degree of freedom experimental setup and compared with PID control performance. The adaptive control scheme is then applied to a robot arm that is conceived to perform tasks in anthropic environments. The adaptive control developed is such that performance of the robot arm is very similar to human arm performance. Experimental results are reported.