Abstract
This study aims at development of soft intelligent rubber actuator of McKibben style. McKibben rubber actuator is an artificial muscle, which is pneumatically driven. At present, almost servo systems using this rubber actuator are driven with external potentiometer or encoder. So the systems tend to grow in size and to takeaway from compliance. In the first report, a soft displacement sensor was developed, and it was incorporated in rubber actuator. We named its actuator Intelligent Rubber-actuator. In this report. We fabricated a robot arm system configured by two Intelligent Rubber-actuators set antagonistically. Experiments with its system show that Intelligent Rubber-actuator has high possibility for application of several robot systems.
