Experimental Study on Nonlinear Position Control of Micro-Hand Considering Hysteresis Characteristics

Abstract

In recent years, the demand for robots has increased in Japan due to labor shortages. In addition to previous demands, they are required to handle a variety of shapes and strengths. For this reason, soft actuators are to be in the spotlight. The micro-hand is one such example, a pneumatically operated actuator made of silicone rubber. It has hysteresis characteristics due to the elasticity of rubber and the effect of the compressed air. However, some previous studies designed a control system to control the position of the micro-hand’s tip without considering them and conducted experiments to confirm its effectiveness. Other studies designed control systems with taking the hysteresis characteristics into account, but did not confirm their effectiveness in experiments. This paper proposed a control system that eliminates the hysteresis characteristics using a hysteresis compensator and confirms its effectiveness through experiments.