Abstract
Recently, robots have been expected to be used in various fields such as not only usual manufacturing industry but also medical welfare, agriculture, security system and so on. Especially, in the coming advanced aged society, the demand of robot will be more increased in medical welfare and human assist technology. In such a field, since robots must work together with human or contact with a human body directly, they are required safety and flexibility.
In this study, in order to realize a flexible mechanisms satisfying the above requirements, a soft actuator has been developed. It is composed of a body made of silicone rubber and driven with a pneumatic power. Both the elasticity of rubber material and the air compressibility are effective to realize such a soft actuator. The developed planar type soft actuator has two layer structure built up with silicone rubber hemispheres and balls, which may be available to carry fragile and shapeless objects, furthermore, to execute flexible contacting tasks for human body. This paper describes a principle of operation, a control method and a fundamental control performance of the proposed actuator.
