Control of 3D printed ambidextrous robot hand actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles

Abstract

Production of robotic hands have significantly increased in recent years due to their high demand in industry and wide scope in number of applications such as tele-operation, mobile robotics, industrial robots, biomedical robotics etc. Following this trend, there have been many researches done on the control of such robotic hands. Since human like clever manipulating, grasping, lifting and sense of different objects are desirable for researchers and crucial in determining the overall performance of any robotic hand, researchers have proposed different methods of controlling such devices. In this paper, we discussed the control methods applied on systems actuated by pneumatic muscles. We tested three different controllers and verified the results on our uniquely designed ambidextrous robotic hand structure. Performances of all three control methods namely proportional–integral-derivative control (PID), Bang-bang control and Backstepping control has been compared and best controller is proposed. For the very first time, we have validated the possibility of controlling multifinger ambidextrous robot hand by using Backstepping Control. The five finger ambidextrous robot hand offers total of 13 degrees of freedom (DOFs) and it can bend its fingers in both ways left side and right side offering full ambidextrous functionality by using only 18 pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs). Pneumatic systems are being widely used in many domestic, industrial and robotic applications due to its advantages such as structural flexibility, simplicity, reliability, safety and elasticity.