Hysteresis Compensation-Based Intelligent Control for Pneumatic Artificial Muscle-Driven Humanoid Robot Manipulators With Experiments Verification

Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs), as a kind of soft actuators, can overcome compliance limitations of traditional rigid actuators to improve the adaptability of robots. However, some inherent strong nonlinearities and time-varying properties of PAMs, e.g., complex hysteresis and creep, may lead to a lot of control problems. In addition, PAM-driven systems are also faced with input constraints (e.g., deadzones, saturations, and unidirectional inputs), unknown/unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances, which badly degrade the control performance and even cause accidents. Therefore, this paper proposes a new hysteresis compensation-based immersion and invariance (I&I) adaptive fuzzy control method for PAM-driven humanoid robot manipulators, which can approximate the unknown functions and estimate the unknown parameters. To our knowledge, this is the first method for PAM-driven systems that compensates for system nonlinearities (not only complex hysteresis, but also input deadzones) by utilizing the prior information in inverse hysteresis models, and simultaneously estimates the unknown functions and parameters by designing a fuzzy update law and a parameter update law based on I&I methodology, respectively, which increases the control frequency of systems and improves tracking performance during high-speed motions. Finally, we apply the proposed approach on a self-built PAM-driven humanoid robot manipulator to validate its effectiveness and robustness. Note to Practitioners-Faced with the practical requirements of robots that interact closely with humans, improving the adaptability and compliance of robots by utilizing soft actuators, such as PAMs, can satisfy current demands. Moreover, PAMs also have many expective characteristics (e.g., high power density, light material, low costs, clean power, etc.), which makes PAMs occupy an important status in the field of soft robotics. However, unknown parameters/structures, strong nonlinearities, and input constraints, may badly degrade the control performance of PAMs. Based on the above characteristics, this paper proposes a new hysteresis compensation-based adaptive fuzzy controller for PAM-driven humanoid robot manipulators, which realizes accurate tracking control during high-speed motions by using inverse hysteresis models to compensate for strong nonlinearities in PAMs, and a fuzzy update law and a parameter update law based on I&I methodology are utilized to estimate unknown parameters/structures. In addition, the proposed controller can simultaneously compensate for input deadzones by utilizing the hysteresis information, which improves the control frequency of the manipulators, and can rapidly suppress tracking errors. Experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the presented method. In the future, more effective compensation methods, such as rate-dependent hysteresis models, will further be carried out to compensate for system nonlinearities.