Development of a Novel Pneumatic Artificial Muscles Actuator Embedded Backbone and Position Sensor Using 3D-Printer

Abstract

This paper proposed a novel Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAM) actuator to solve critical problems that bring about buckling and disturb linear motion due to structure characteristics. The traditional PAM actuators in a relaxed state require an additional mechanism due to bucking. Also the PAM actuator need to precise external sensors. As a result, the size of the entire system is large and heavy, so it is difficult to miniaturize and integrate. Also the PAM actuators cannot be used in a small mechanism such as a robot hand tip. Therefor we proposed a novel PAM actuator that do not need to an additional mechanism such as link, joint, tendon and transmission and external sensors in order to eliminate these problems.