Baps; Pneumatic Actuation

Abstract

This chapter reports the development of the pneumatic components that we used for all robots in this book. The choice for pneumatic actuation has advantages as well as drawbacks compared to actuation with electric DC motors. The advantage is the inherent compliance of the McKibben muscles (Section 3.1). The good match between the compliant McKibben muscles and the concept of passive dynamic walking was the main argument in favor of the choice for pneumatics. The main drawback is the lack of sufficiently lightweight commercially available components, which means that many of the components must be specially developed for the research project (Section 3.2). A second drawback is the difficulty of implementing high-bandwidth control, which may be a reason for us to switch to electric DC motors for our future prototypes. However, for the phasic (i.e. once-per-step) actuation that we have implemented in all robots in this book, the pneumatic system is a satisfactory choice (Section 3.3). The complete, autonomous pneumatic system can successfully power a biped robot as demonstrated with the prototype ‘Baps’ (Section 3.4). The content of this chapter is based on four of our papers [157, 159, 158, 186].