A Simple Phenomenological Modeling of McKibben Pneumatic Actuator and Its Application to Control

The focus of the paper is to develop a simple phenomenological model of McKibben pneumatic actuator which is capable of capturing its inherit nonlinear and varying dynamical characteristics under different load conditions. It will be shown that physical work analysis determines the model structure and phenomenological nonlinear spring term is introduced into the model to capture the response characteristics. A simple control system for the actuator using proposed model structure to construct exogenous load observer is also presented. Load carry experiment using single arm exoskeleton unit has been conducted to validate the performance of the proposed control system.