Design and Control of an EMG Driven IPMC Based Artificial Muscle Finger

Abstract

object. During holding the object, stable EMG signal is required. For this purpose, stable EMG signal is sent through proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to the system. Experimentally, it is found that IPMC based artificial muscle finger achieves similar movement like human index finger. This IPMC based artificial muscle finger attains deflection upto 12 mm. By developing a prototype of IPMC artificial muscle finger based micro gripper, it is demonstrated that EMG driven system like IPMC artificial muscle finger based micro gripper can be applicable in handling of light weight components. The major advantages of such system are that IPMC based artificial muscle finger tip shows the compliant behavior and consumes less energy for actuation. Therefore, EMG driven system shows enough potential to substitute for conventional mechanism in micro manipulation and rehabilitation technology. This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the prior research related to EMG applications in robotics and bio-mimetics. Section 3.1 explains the basic design of IPMC artificial muscle finger based micro gripper which is driven by EMG signal. The basic tendon of index finger is studied in section 3.2 where muscles are identified for actuation of IPMC based artificial muscle finger. In section 3.3, a model for controlling the EMG signal is highlighted. Different types of control system are implemented for achieving stable data from EMG signal via index finger which is sent to IPMC based artificial muscle finger. Section 4 discusses experimental testing setup for activation of IPMC based artificial muscle finger by human finger through EMG. In section 5, the results are discussed and the conclusions are drawn in section 6. The future work is recommended in section 7.