Active behavior of musculoskeletal robot arms driven by pneumatic artificial muscles to effectively receive human's direct teaching

Abstract

Direct teaching is suitable for generating motions of robot arms which have complex kinematics. So far, we have proposed a direct teaching method specialized for musculoskeletal robot arms actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) based on their pressure and tension information. In the method, it is important to prevent slacks and excessive tensions of PAMs to efficiently obtain the pressure and the tension information during the teaching phase. In this research, we propose a method for generating active behavior of musculoskeletal robots driven by PAMs to effectively receive human's direct teaching. The method, which is naturally derived from the simple analytical model of PAMs, requires only pressure and tension information of PAMs in musculoskeletal robot arms and does not need to cope with complex inverse kinematics problem. The validity of the method has been confirmed in the experiment using a minimalistic 2DOFs anthropomorphic musculoskeletal robot arm actuated by three pairs of agonist/antagonist PAMs.