Development and Control of a Pneumatic Robot Arm for Industrial Fields

We developed a pneumatic robot arm driven by pneumatic actuators as a versatile end effector for material handling systems. The arm consists of a pneumatic hand and pneumatic wrist. The hand can grasp various objects without force sensors or feedback control. Therefore, this study aims to control the wrist motions to expand the hand motion's space. The hand mimics the human hand shape and can grasp objects that have different shapes and mechanical characteristics. The wrist has redundant degrees of freedom. This is useful when the robot moves to avoid obstacles. However, the drive mechanism of the wrist has nonlinearity from a mechanical viewpoint. Also, the pneumatic actuators used as the drive source have hysteresis characteristics. These features make the wrist motions difficult to control. Because the wrist is used in material handling systems, its motions need to be freely controlled. Therefore, in this research, experimental models of the drive system of the pneumatic robot wrist have been constructed. With the constructed models, the control systems were designed through simulations. After that, we attempted to control the wrist motions with the constructed controllers. As a result, the wrist models are coincident with wrist motions. Finally, experimental results were obtained that match the simulation results.