Improvement of Control Performances of Rubber Artificial Muscle Manipulator and Its Application for Human-Robot Collaboration Task

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A rubber artificial muscle is suitable for the human collaborating task owing to its essential features of flexibility. However, it is not easy to implement a satisfactory manipulation performance since its damping characteristic is not sufficient. Then an electric rheological damper (ER damper) whose damping characteristic can be regulated is attached to the manipulator's joint, which leads to a satisfactory control performances by applying an active control of pneumatic servo with a damping control using an ER damper.At the same time, the rubber artificial muscle manipulator is applied to a function recovery training of human arms as a rehabilitation robot. Experiments results showed the effectiveness of a proposed unified implementation scheme for several function recovery training modes by using impedance control method. Also an identification method of characteristic of rehabilitant's arm was proposed for the purpose of a realization of an autonomous rehabilitation robot, in which characteristic of arm is estimated by the second order mechanical impedance model. Each parameter of the impedance model is identified using adaptive identifier at the same time with an implementation of a training manipulation. Consequently the recovery level can be estimated during the training manipulation simulataneously, which is expected to be an effective method to realize an autonomous rehabilitation robot.Following two matters are left as a future work, one is how the identified parameters should be reflected on the function recovery training manipulation and the other is the development of constitution of human-robot collaboration system in order to unify the training manipulation with an identification one.