Ball-Handling Control of 14-DOF Pneumatic Dual Manipulator by Position Based Impedance Control

Robots utilized in the field of welfare or agriculture should be light in weight and flexible in structure. A pneumatic actuator has properties such that it is more powerful compared with a motor of same weight, and that it is flexible, clean and unexplosive. In this paper we propose a new structure of the pneumatic actuator with two-degree-of-freedom. By using proposed pneumatic actuators, we can easily construct multi-degree-of-freedom pneumatic manipulators. Here we constructed a fourteen-degree-of-freedom pneumatic dual manipulator. The performance of the dual manipulators is confirmed through experiments for ball-handling with impedance control. In the experiments several control schemes, including the decentralized control and the simple adaptive control (SAC), were used. The results show that a flexibility of the pneumatic actuator is appropriate to accomplish the coordinative motion of the right and left arms of the robot.