Abstract
Recently, the demand for robots that operate in the fields of nursing and human life have increased due to the aging population and falling birthrates. Since these robots are intended to operate near humans, they are preferable to be light, soft and safe. To satisfy these requirements, we adopt a pneumatic artificial muscle as an actuator of robot manipulator. However, the McKibben-type artificial muscles that are most commonly used have several drawbacks. Therefore, we developed a straight-fiber-type artificial muscle, and developed two degrees of freedom artificial muscle manipulator with a differential gear mechanism. However, the interference occurs in unintended directions in this mechanism because the rotation speed of right and left gears respectively differs. To address this problem, we introduce the disturbance observer (DOB) in the control system. We control the response of right and left gears by disturbance observer and reduce the interference.
