Control and analysis of robot arm using flexible pneumatic cylinder

Abstract

The main characteristics of robot are the precision work with a high degree of reliability and the repetitive over long period that makes it suitable for use in the medical field. In this paper, the control and analysis of robot arm for the human wrist rehabilitation by using flexible pneumatic cylinder is introduced. The system consists of a slave arm, a master arm, a high-speed microcomputer, compact and inexpensive quasi-servo valves, a potentiometer and accelerometers to give the references for the attitude control. The robot arm has three degrees-of-freedom that is bending, extending and contracting. The control performances of the robot arm were investigated and the analytical model of the whole robot arm system including the flexible pneumatic cylinder, the quasi-servo valves and an embedded controller was proposed and tested for estimating the performance theoretically. We also made comparisons between the calculated and experimental results to confirm the validities of the proposed model and the identified system parameters. The results from experiments show that the proposed models accurately predict the behavior of the tested flexible robot arm using flexible pneumatic cylinders. The proposed master-slave control system has a potential for application for robot-assisted rehabilitation and training especially for human wrist.

Keywords

• pneumatic robot arm
• flexible pneumatic cylinder
• rehabilitation device
• master-slave control
• analytical model
• on/off control valve