Abstract
In recent years, Japanese society has been aging, engendering a labor shortage of young workers. Robots are therefore expected to be useful to perform tasks such as day-to-day work support for elderly people. Therefore, a tendon-driven balloon actuator has been developed for the robot hand in such environments. In this study, we have evaluated characteristics of force control of a balloon actuator using a predictive functional control (PFC) system. Predictive functional control is one of the models based on predictive control (MPC) schemes, which predict the future outputs of the actual plant over the prediction horizon and compute the control effort over the control horizon at every sampling instance. In this paper, PFC control performance of a 1-link finger using a pneumatic balloon actuator is reported.
