Positioning Control of a Pneumatic Drive Manipulator by Using Model Based Control

Pneumatic drive systems have higher power/weight ratio. So, it is easy to make a compact and lightweight robot manipulator. On the other hand, it is very difficult to control this manipulator because of interference force between each axis and large friction which is caused by mechanical seal. Therefore, we applied model based control to a pneumatic drive manipulator, and we proposed the disturbance observer which used the concept of model based control. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is shown through experiments. Further more, we designed a compact robot manipulator using the link built-in rotary cylinder. As a result, we can state that we can use a pneumatic drive manipulator, which is very small and very light, as a industrial robot.