2012 Volume 48 Issue 8 Pages 470-478
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. In particular, robots, which are intended for use in the field of medical care and welfare, are expected to be safe when operating in a human environment because they often come into contact with people. Furthermore, robots must perform various tasks such as regrasping, grasping of soft objects, and tasks using frictional force. Given these demands and circumstances, The stiffness-changeable finger has been developed for the robot hand in such environments. In this study, we have evaluated characteristics of force control of stiffness-changeable finger using balloon actuator by predictive functional control (PFC) system. The predictive functional control is one of the model based 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 performances of the finger using balloon actuator are reported.
