Bionic Design of a 7-DOF Human-arm-like Manipulator Actuated by Antagonized Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Abstract

Humanoid robot has a wide application area and thus attracts a large number of researchers to study it. In this paper, we designed and implemented a human-arm-like manipulator with seven Degrees of Freedom (DOFs) according to the human-arm model of KIT motion capture database. DOF configurations of the robot are similar to those of human-arm, and the mechanical structure is designed to make the motion of every DOF, which is actuated by a pair of antagonized pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs), independent from each other. Bowden cables are elaborately deployed to make the motion of adjacent DOFs decoupling from each other in favor of the control of the robotic arm. As a result, the robot can achieve motions as the same as those of the human arm. We validate it via simulations using the KIT human motion capture data, and suggest that this design scheme of the robotic arm can be used to improve the performance of humanoid robot in the human-centered environment as a cooperative robot or in the tele-manipulation application as a homogeneous slave robot.