Enhanced safety with joint compliance control of Pneumatic Muscles

Abstract

The safety of humans working with robots is an important issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but fundamental limits to meet required safety have been met owing to the absence of compliance in the robot actuators. Pneumatic Muscle (PM) is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve the joint compliance. Here, the joint compliance actuated by PM is actively utilised to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the authors present a novel approach to control compliance and position independently without affecting on the each others performance using PMs. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.