Chapters authored
Design and Control of the McKibben Artificial Muscles Actuated Humanoid Manipulator
The McKibben Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs) are expected to endow the advanced robots with the ability of coexisting and cooperating with humans. However, the application of PAMs is still severely hindered by some critical issues. Focusing on the bionic design issue, this chapter in detail presents the design of a 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) human-arm-like manipulator. It takes the antagonized PAMs and Bowden cables to mimic the muscle-tendon-ligament structure of human arm by elaborately configuring the DOFs and flexibly deploying the routing of Bowden cables; as a result, the DOFs of the analog shoulder, elbow, and wrist of the robotic arm intersect at a point respectively and the motion of these DOFs is independent from each other for convenience of human-like motion. The model imprecision caused by the strong nonlinearity is universally acknowledged as a main drawback of the PAM systems. Focusing on this issue, this chapter views the model imprecision as an internal disturbance, and presents an approach that observe these disturbances with extended-state-observer (ESO) and compensate them with full-order-sliding-mode-controller (fSMC), via experiments validated the human-like motion performance with expected robustness and tracking accuracy. Finally, some variants of PAMs for remedying the drawbacks of the PAM systems are discussed.
Part of the book: Rehabilitation of the Human Bone-Muscle System