Abstract
A pneumatic robot seems available to contacting tasks, because its compliant property caused by air compressibility is effective to absorb the collision force and to precisely control the contacting force. In this paper, the relationship between the inherent compliance due to air compressibility and the collision force is investigated. Also the compliance control method is discussed. The following is concluded. 1) To avoid the excessive collision force, joints are required to have as a low stiffness as possible. On this matter, a pneumatic robot is advantageous. 2) The proposed compliance control method being a hybrid of conventional position-based and force-based methods is useful to a contacting trace control. 3) A pneumatic robot can be expected to execute a stable contacting task even for fairly rugged object surface.
This study shows the availability of a pneumatic robot to contacting tasks.
