A bionic robotic ankle driven by the multiple pneumatic muscle actuators

Abstract

The traditional pneumatic muscle robot joint has weak load capacity and low control precision. This paper proposes a bionic robotic ankle driven by multiple pneumatic muscle actuators. The structural design of the bionic robotic ankle and the drive mechanism that imitates human muscle recruitment are introduced. A dynamic model of the ankle and a static model of the pneumatic muscle actuator are established to analyze the driving characteristics. The multi-muscle recruiting strategy and load matching control method are optimized, and the output characteristics are simulated, including the robotic ankle driven by a single pneumatic muscle actuator, the robotic ankle driven by dual pneumatic muscle actuators, and the bionic ankle driven by multiple pneumatic muscle actuators. A prototype and testing platform are developed, and experimental research is carried out to validate the theoretical analysis and simulation. The results show that the bionic robotic ankle driven by multiple pneumatic muscle actuators can match varied loads, effectively reducing angle error and increasing output force.

Keywords

Pneumatic muscle actuator / Bionic robotic ankle / Load matching / Recruiting strategy

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Delei Fang: Writing - original draft, Validation, Supervision, Project administration, Conceptualization. Fangyuan Ren: Validation, Formal analysis. Jianwei Wang: Software, Investigation. Pan Li: Validation, Investigation. Lin Cao: Conceptualization. Junxia Zhang: Validation, Resources, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was partly suported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52005369), Open Project Fund of Tianjin Key Laboratory of Integrated Design and Online Monitoring of Light Industry and Food Engineering Machinery and Equipment (2020LIMFE05).

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