Development of a pneumatic master–slave system comprising entirely mechanical components

Abstract

In recent years, master–slave systems with pneumatic actuators, which are necessary to realize a safe and secure society, have attracted increasing attention and are currently being used in the medical and welfare fields. In addition, they are used in disaster-recovery support through application to remote-controlled robots. The master–slave system proposed in this study aims at improving safety and reliability by controlling a pneumatic actuator with mechanical feedback. A characteristic analysis is essential to improve the performance and expand the possibilities for incorporation into practical systems. The purpose of this study is to clarify the performance of a master–slave system comprising only mechanical components and consider possible applications. We have developed a pneumatic master–slave system that uses a one-axis stage and a precision pressure regulator as the master and a pneumatic positioning device as the slave and performed characteristic confirmation experiments. First, we modeled the pneumatic positioning device and compared it with the actual step response. Next, we made a prototype of the master–slave system and conducted characteristic confirmation experiments such as step response and response to repeated inputs. Our experimental results suggest that this system is suitable for applications that require relatively low speeds and positioning accuracies of several millimeters, such as nursing-care assisting systems, transportation-support systems at production sites, and robots with expanded human abilities.

Keywords

• pneumatic master–slave system
• mechanical feedback
• pneumatic positioning device
• modeling
• positioning accuracy
• remote control