Modelling and validation of a 1-dof arm powered by pneumatic muscles

Pneumatic artificial muscles - or McKibben Muscles - are low-impedance actuators and their cliaracteristies make them very, interesting for developing robotic applications that feature low impedance in terms of interaction with the environment, as for instance prothoses, orthoses or some wearable robots. In order to research the applicability of these actuators in industrial applications and in the development of orthoses and wearable robots. a one-degree-of-freedom arm driven by pneumatic muscles manufactured by Festo has been designed and built at the Ikerlan research centre. This paper focuses on the modelling of the experimental set-Lip. and on the model validation with experimental data. As a basis for that, a pneumatic muscle model has been developed in Modelica. After a description of the set-up constructed.. the modelling of the whole system in Dymola,/Modelica is explained. Finally, model validation is presented., where experimental results are compared to those obtained in Simulation.