Research On Characteristics Of Flexible Pneumatic Actuator FPA And Its Application In Multi-Fingered Dexterous Hand Design

As final executing manipulator for robot to interact with outside environment, the terminal actuators have been paid much attention. Besides the traditional rigid driving and executing devices, many researchers have great interests in pneumatic artificial muscle PMA, which has quite a few characteristics, such as simple structure, high power/weight ratio etc. Pneumatic muscle joint and anthropomorphic arm had been developed based on PMA. However, assistant devices are needed to construct joint or arm with PMA, which increases the volume and weight. This makes the structure bigger and the control more difficult. The new type flexible pneumatic actuator FPA, developed by our researching group, is a kind of actuator as well as manipulator. Different joints can be designed using FPA. Based on the previous research, properties of FPA and joints are studied profoundly in this paper. Flexible pneumatic 3-fingered hand and dexterous multi-fingered hand are proposed based on FPA. All the work in this paper lays the foundation of research and application of FPA and flexible joints.Firstly, the static model and basical properties of FPA are profoundly studied. The changing principles of average radius and shell thickness of rubber tube are analyzed, and the effects on FPA property are discussed. Based on the established static model, the isoforce property, isobaric property and isometric property of FPA are analyzed. Besides, the stability of FPA striker under out force is researched. The dynamic models of inflating and deflating for FPA are built based on pneumatic hydrodynamics. The effects of different parameters on the dynamic process of FPA are analyzed. Experiments were carried out to verify the mathematic model and test the basic properties of FPA.Adding constraining wire in FPA rubber tube results in the flexible...