Identification of Axial and Radial Impacts for Pneumatic Artificial Muscles in Static and Dynamic Processes Based on Autocorrelations of Differential Pressure Signals

Abstract

Since the pneumatic artificial muscle is usually employed to actuate the robot, it is inevitable that it will collide with obstacles and/or other objects such that there will be impacts. The typical impacts include the axial and radial ones. This paper detects these two kinds of impact by a designed differential pressure measurement system, and achieves the goal of identifying them by the autocorrelations of their differential pressure signals in both static and dynamic processes, which are the two main work processes of the pneumatic artificial muscle. In detail, first we design an experiment scheme by connecting the pneumatic artificial muscle to the differential pressure sensor through two pressure tubes; then the axial and radial impact signals are acquired via the impact experiments under different work conditions (impact strength, internal pressure, load, and impact position); finally, the identification of the axial and radial impact signals are achieved based on the autocorrelation technique with a well-selected threshold. The experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the whole method.