Novel equilibrium-point control of agonist-antagonist system with pneumatic artificial muscles

This paper presents a novel method for controlling a single-joint robot arm driven by two pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs). We introduce the concepts of the agonist-antagonist muscle-pairs ratio (A-A ratio) and the agonist-antagonist muscle-pairs activity (A-A activity), and demonstrate that our concepts enable separate linear control of the equilibrium joint angle and joint stiffness. We also discuss our approach in comparison with the equilibrium-point (EP) hypothesis.