Abstract

Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAM) have many useful properties (low cost, high power to weight ratio, flexibility…), but present a challenge if we want to achieve accurate position control due to their nonlinear characteristics. In this paper we present the development of the new control algorithm for the accurate position control of two antagonistically coupled PAM’s. We tested the algorithm on an experimental setup (rotational one-DOF pneumatic actuator with two PAM’s) for measuring muscles’ response. Newly developed control algorithm is an upgraded A-PID (Adaptive PID) control algorithm (by M. Pipan), that was developed for a linear actuator with only one pneumatic artificial muscle. The final part of this paper contains the comparison of experimental results to two other similar systems.