Control of pneumatic five-fingered robot hand using antagonistic muscle ratio and antagonistic muscle activity

Abstract

Recently, research into robots that coexist with people in areas such as the service and medical industries is active. Such robots need to be both safe and flexible. To satisfy this demand, a pneumatic actuator is appropriate because it has natural compliance and is lightweight. Our research focuses on a joint angle control method for a five-fingered robot hand using low-pressure driven pneumatic actuators. This robot imitates the structure of the human hand, which has antagonistic muscle pairs for each joint. We proposed a biologically-inspired control method using the following parameters: “antagonistic muscle ratio” and “antagonistic muscle activity”, and implemented the proposed method in a five-fingered robot hand.