Modeling and dynamic analysis of a robotic arm with pneumatic artificial muscle by transfer matrix method

Pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) has attracted significant attention owing to its safe and compliant physical properties in industrial manipulators, along with advanced service technologies. Since PAM is prone to large deformation problems, actuation control, and dynamic identification is required to perceive considering precise and fast computation. This article presents a methodology for accurate dynamic modeling and analysis of a planar robotic arm in the presence of large deformations caused by the artificial muscle. This novel planar robotic arm with pneumatic actuation and spring loaded in an antagonistic form is designed and fabricated. This article deals with the displacement analysis of a new type of PAM-actuated mechanism for large deformation. The aim is to find an accurate mathematical model of this robotic arm with motion nonlinearity. Since vibration can be generated in the articulating operations according to the dynamic behavior of PAM, a transfer-matrix method is proposed to explore the effect of flexibility undergoing planar flexural deformation. An explanation of the procedure through presenting its general formulation is employed to experiment. The discrete method is analyzed beside the rich datasets generated for actuator identification in the preliminary experimental study. The transfer matrices are determined considering the flexibilities whereas results are verified using MSC.ADAMS©. Experimental validation and numerical modeling confirm that the presented modeling methods help to improve the performance of the pneumatic muscle drives in high-precision manipulators. This study leaves room for further development of this algorithmic framework with a more complicated mechanism with soft pneumatic network actuators for various designs.