This chapter presents construction, control, advantages and disadvantages of various pneumatic actuators we have been using in several projects of climbing, walking and serpentine robots during last 13 years. We start with qualitative and quantitative analysis of different actuators. This part is mostly based on the literature review but augmented with our own experience related to these partic...

The control of articulated soft robots, i.e. robots with flexible joints and rigid links, presents a challenge due to their intrinsic elastic elements nonlinear force-deflection dependency. This letter first proposes discrete-time delayed unknown input-state observer based on nominal robot model that reconstructs the total torque disturbance vector, resulting from imperfect knowledge characteri...

Mixed H2/H∞ method is proposed to design a controller for flexible joint robots (FJR) considering actuator saturation. By considering the control action in the mixed sensitivity function one can reduce the amplitude of the control action but this may affect all frequencies. A more advanced method based on frequency weighting of the control action contribution in the mixed sensitivity function i...

in this paper an energy dissipation rate control (edrc) method is introduced, which could provide stable walking or running gaits for legged robots. this method is realized by developing a semi-analytical pattern generation approach for a robot during each single support phase (ssp). as yet, several control methods based on passive dynamic walking have been proposed by researchers to provide an...

In this paper we present an automatic model identification tool of ABB's industrial robots. The tool has been developed entirely in Matlab and has made extensive use of the graphical-user-interface options and the objectoriented design philosophy made possible in Matlab versions 5.0 and newer. The tool is able to automatically identify rigid-body robot parameters such as inertias and Coriolis f...

This paper presents analytical and experimental results of an investigation of joint actuators and their suitability for a particular class of complex mechanisms: serpentine robots. In practice, serpentine robots usually comprise of multiple segments connected by joints. Some serpentine robots provide legged, wheeled, or tracked propulsion, and, in addition, actuation for the joints. We compare...

This paper focuses on parameter identification of a target tracker robot possessing flexible joints using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Since, belt and pulley mechanisms are known as flexible joints in robotic systems, their elastic behavior affecting a tracker robot is investigated in this work. First, dynamic equations governing the robot behavior are extracted taking into acco...

Flexible robots have given rise to numerous investigations, and their use is easily justified in two main cases: (1) when the weight of the robot has to be minimized and (2) when collisions of the robot with the environment are foreseen, as a flexible lightweight robot delivers less impact energy. Much work has been done by different authors on the position control of flexible robots using feed...

The upper limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot can realize the partial functional compensation of and complete various types training for each joint limb. However, existing robots are lack flexible reconfigurability, which difficult to meet diversified patient objects needs, have some problems, such as insufficient motion compliance, poor portability, wearing comfort. To effectively solve abov...