832 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO.
4, JULY 2011
Position and Compliance Control of a Pneumatic
Muscle Actuated Manipulator for Enhanced Safety
Tae-Yong Choi, Student Member, IEEE, Byoung-Suk Choi, Student Member, IEEE, and Kap-Ho Seo, Member, IEEE
Abstract—The safety of humans who work with robots is an im-
portant issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but
fundamental limits to meet safety requirements have been encoun-
tered owing to the absence of compliance in robot actuators. Pneu-
matic muscle is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the
advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve joint compliance. In this
study, joint compliance actuated by pneumatic muscle is actively
utilized to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the
authors present a novel approach to control compliance and asso-
ciated positions independently with no cross-performance effects
using pneumatic muscles. The proposed method is verified by sim-
ulation and experiments using a physical robot.
Index Terms—Human robot interaction, joint compliance, pneu-
matic muscle, safety.
I. INTRODUCTION
V ARIOUS service and industrial robots have been devel-
oped to help people accomplish a range of tasks. Such
robots must interact closely with humans. Because of this close
interaction, the traditional metrics of robot performance must
be augmented by an attention to safety in their design. Accord-
ingly, a considerable amount of research related to safe robots
has been conducted. In order to avoid collisions with obstacles,
Graham et al. [1] and Karlsson et al. [2] used a sensor fusion
method to detect high-risk obstacles in working spaces. Ohashi
et al. [3] used the arms of a humanoid robot to avoid collisions
in a manner similar to human motion. However, the most se-
rious injuries or hazards result from collisions that occur after
collision avoidance methods fail.
Improvements to reduce injury in collisions can be realized
through proper mechanical design. This paper also addresses a
method to reduce injuries that result from collisions. Regarding
this problem, Zinn et al. [4] proposed a new actuation mech-
anism in which the actuator is divided into low- and high-fre-
quency terms to effectively reduce the stiffness of the manipu-
Manuscript received September 28, 2009; revised January 11, 2010; accepted
April 02, 2010. Manuscript received in final form June 02, 2010. Date of publi-
cation August 05, 2010; date of current version June 17, 2011. Recommended
by Associate Editor G. E. Stewart.
T.-Y. Choi was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-701, Korea. He
is now with Samsung Electronics, Suwon 443-742, Korea (e-mail: taeyong-
choi@kaist.ac.kr).
B.-S. Choi is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 305-701, Korea (e-mail:
bs_choi@kaist.ac.kr).
K.-H. Seo is with the Pohang Institute of Intelligent Robotics (PIRO), Pohang
790-784, Korea (e-mail: neoworld@kaist.ac.kr).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2010.2052362
1063-6536/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
lator. Hirzinger et al. [5] developed a lightweight manipulator
DLR to decrease inertia. However, these attempts inevitably em-
ployed highly complex mechanisms and controllers with var-
ious sensors due to the absence of a compliance property in the
actuators. This is related to the use of motors as basic actuators.
There is a limit to the achievement of joint compliance when
using motors, which must use gears due to the low torque of
these components [6].
To overcome the drawbacks of conventional approaches,
pneumatic muscle (PM) has been investigated as an attractive
actuator that provides safe characteristics. PM offers a high
ratio of torque with respect to its weight and size, making it
possible to actuate machines without resorting to gears. Among
its various aspects, the intrinsic elasticity of PM is its most
attractive property with respect to achieving compliance in
various applications. For walking robots, the elasticity of PM
is utilized to allow natural walking [7]–[9]. PM has also been
applied to a robot arm on the basis of its torque performance
[10]. In the case of an exoskeleton-type wearable design, PM
is used for the shoulder blades in humanoid robots [11]. Its
compliance property is utilized in the exoskeleton-type wear-
able design of a recently proposed therapy machine [12]. Zhu
et al. [13] used PM for the linear actuators in their parallel
manipulator. Additionally, several studies involving the use of
PM have been conducted to address safety issues. In [14] and
[15], Bicchi et al. devised a soft arm with adjustable stiffness
functions and examined its safety properties. Even with their
feasible idea of variable stiffness actuation (VSA), there was no
specific consideration of the positioning problem. Positioning
is challenging problem for manipulators with PM owing to its
sensitivity to external elements. Tonietti et al. [16] introduced
an adaptive control method related to Bicchi’s [14] work. Clapa
et al. [17] introduced an equilibrium point control method
using a 2-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) manipulator with PM.
However, the PI controller used in their work is not suitable
for PM in which the parameters can vary. Moreover, they did
not consider a stiffness control method. Van Damme et al.
[18] used the proxy-based SMC (PBSMC) of Kikuuwe et al.
[19] to increase the safety of their manipulator, which was
actuated by pleated pneumatic artificial muscle (PPAM) with
notable positioning performances. However, that solution has
the significant disadvantage of low tracking performance for a
large initial error owing to its delayed positioning.
Due to the considerable number of challenges involved in
such work, few studies have considered both safety and po-
sitioning performance [17], [18]. Thus, in this study, a novel
method to enhance safety using PM is introduced. Here, an in-
dependent joint compliance controller (IJCC) is added to a po-
sition controller for the purpose of controlling the position and
CHOI et al.: POSITION AND COMPLIANCE CONTROL OF A PNEUMATIC MUSCLE ACTUATED MANIPULATOR 833

compliance of the manipulator simultaneously. The added IJCC TABLE I

provides enhanced safety in collisions through online control of
the joint compliance. To enable control of joint compliance, a
VSA mechanism is applied. The total controller is composed of
the IJCC and the position controller. Compliance from the IJCC
has no direct effect on the position of the manipulator, but the
vibration caused by joint compliance results in position errors.
To suppress vibration, Tzafetas et al. [20] and Park et al. [21]
used adaptive impedance control and a robust control approach.
Katsura et al. [22] proposed a method to reduce vibration in
collisions in which the environment of the robot is taken into
account numerically. However, suppressing vibration upon PM
actuation is nearly impossible in practical terms owing to the nu-
merous unpredictable perturbations of position control, such as
variation and errors in the PM model parameters. In particular,
the PM characteristics can be affected by temperature, humidity,
and operational stress. In conventional studies related to PM, a
sliding mode controller (SMC) has been considered to be the
most suitable position controller with respect to minimizing the
effort related to complex error dynamics [18], [23], and [24].
In this work, a boundary layer augmented SMC (BASMC)
is used for position control with mitigated chattering while
securing reasonable positioning performance, even with large
joint compliance from an IJCC. Finally, the safety of both
humans and robots during collisions is advanced by increased
joint compliance. The advantages of the proposed method are
as follows.
1) Online control of the joint compliance is assured indepen-
dent of the position control.
2) An easy method to meet the safety requirements is offered
without resorting to complex algorithms or mechanisms.
3) Safety is enhanced without a loss of positioning perfor-
mance.
4) No use of expensive force/torque feedback sensors is
needed.
This paper is arranged as follows. Section II derives the
dynamics of a two-link manipulator based on a numerical PM
model. In addition, the joint compliance characteristic is studied.
Section III describes the control method for a robot actuated by
PM. A BASMC is used for positioning with an IJCC. Section IV
discusses a simulation of position control as well as collisions
with obstacles for the two-link manipulator. Section V gives the
experimental results from a case similar to that considered in
the simulation. Experiments demonstrating user safety during
collisions are also presented. Section VI discusses the limit of
the proposed idea, and Section VII concludes this work.
II. SYSTEM MODELING
A. Numerical Modeling of PM
DETERMINED PM’S PARAMETERS FROM EXPERIMENTS
and a nonlinear contraction, as in
(1)
inflation
deflation
(2)
where means the amount of PM contraction, with
corresponding to the fully deflated or relaxed PM. means
pressure. is a hanging mass. are spring
constant, damping constant, and elemental contraction force by
PM without spring and damping characteristic, and modeled as
(2). The coefficient of friction B depends on whether the PM
is being inflated or deflated. By rearranging (1), an equation of
motion for a mass is given like
(3)
where is a given force to a mass . or is the
acceleration term of the mass .
Here, the form of (3) is used as the base model. Most re-
searchers agree on PM’s fundamental elements, such as the
force, spring and damping terms. The process to determine pa-
rameters of PM model such as ,
and is necessary before manipulator modeling. Each value
of PM model parameters was determined as in Table I by
following the procedure of [28] and [29].
B. Modeling of a Joint
The antagonistic configuration of PM will now be considered.
PM can only contract, so if one side of a pair of PMs is con-
tracted, it has no way to return unless the other side of the pair
contracts to stretch it. This characteristic requires a pair of PMs
for one degree of freedom, as shown in Fig. 1. Final actuator
torque from a PM pair is the difference between two PMs if the
torque of each muscle is defined as in (5). Mathematically, the
relation is described as (6). Reference [23] has used the model
from [28], and [23] was referred to here to get the final joint
torque equation

A PM’s mathematical model is necessary to adapt it to use (4)

in a robot manipulator. The PM’s nonlinearity has been a chal-
lenging problem and some advanced models such as [25]–[28] where is from to with clockwise positive direc-
have been suggested. Among them, Reynolds et al. [28] is an tion
easy model to apply to robots with PMs. The dynamic behavior
of a PM hanging vertically and actuating a mass has been mod-
eled as a combination of nonlinear friction, a nonlinear spring (5)
834 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 4, JULY 2011

Fig. 1. Basic configuration of robot arm with PMs. (a) and (b) are PMs of the Fig. 2. Two-link manipulator schematic. (a) and (c) are PMs of bicep. (b) and
bicep and tricep. (d) are PMs of tricep. A pair of (a) and (b) actuate a joint of J1 and a pair of (c)
and (d) actuate a joint of J2.

where and mean the torque of bicep and tricep muscle. where and are described in
The parameters of , and is from (2). and are the
contraction length of bicep and tricep. is the radius of joint

(10)

(6)
C. Compliance Property of a Joint
Until now a link depends on two input of and . A link The key idea in modifying joint compliance is to adjust the
is actuated by the torque difference of two muscles, so only the nominal pressure of the bicep and tricep upon PM actuation.
pressure difference can be the unique input. Each pressure input A PM’s nominal pressure dominates the joint stiffness prop-
can be set like (7) to match only one input to a link erty without affecting the joint angle at a constant . The
torque of the joint’s spring force terms is derived as in (11) by
extracting the spring terms from (10)
(7)
(8)

where and are nominal pressures. is the max- (11)

imum pressure that compressor can generate in real. Then,
is the pressure difference between two muscles where is the spring torque at a joint. and are spring
at given time, and only become the controllable unique torque from bicep and tricep. is the stiffness value.
input. is the nominal pressure difference between bicep By applying (4) and (8)–(11), spring torque equation is de-
and tricep. is derived by setting equal to at given rived like
nominal position. Final torque from PM pairs is described like
(9) from (6) to (7)

(9) (12)
CHOI et al.: POSITION AND COMPLIANCE CONTROL OF A PNEUMATIC MUSCLE ACTUATED MANIPULATOR
Fig. 3. Proposed system’s safety improvement strategy.
Finally the joint compliance of a joint is derived as in
(13)
D. Dynamics of Two-Link Manipulator With PMS
Two-link manipulator’s dynamics is a general approach and
is well described in many textbook as a form of
(14)
where is a robot inertia matrix, is a matrix of Coriolis and
centrifugal effects and is a matrix of gravity loading. is a
torque.
We can derive the dynamics equation of (15) which has the
input of pressure and the output of joint acceleration by re-
placing torque of (14) by (9)
(15)
where
(16)
(17)
For the above equations, and are for each link1
and link2. and are for each link1 and link2. and
are for each link1 and link2. If we set the nominal pressure
as the and , then and matrix is directly defined by
current joint value and joint velocity.
III. WHOLE MANIPULATOR CONTROL
A. Control Strategy
Supposing a collision between an object and a robot, the main
damage that occurs during the recognition period is presented in
Fig. 3. Most robot will stop control or take some post-collision
actions once the collision situation is recognized. However, the
collision recognition process expends some time, even if that
time is less than one second. Objects can be damaged or hu-
mans injured during this very short time, and the robot cannot
avoid this recognition delay. Hence, the most important factor
to enhance robot safety in the event of a collision is to reduce the
835
Fig. 4. Whole manipulator controller. (a) Joint compliance controller(IJCC).
(b) Position controller (BASMC).
damage that occurs during the collision or during the collision
recognition period.
Post-collision action is beyond the scope of this work. De-
termining appropriate post-collision action is another complex
and considerable challenge that must be met in order to enhance
robot safety. However, this study uses the basic control-stop ac-
tion as a post-collision action. The measure to estimate a colli-
sion is as follows:
Collision detected: (18)
where is the joint angle error threshold and is the joint
velocity error threshold due to the collision. This condition is
continuously inspected once the transient condition is satisfied
after the initial movement. By doing this, manipulator can pre-
vent faulty operation owing to large initial joint errors. The tran-
sient condition is set as follows:
Transient condition: and
(19)
where is the sampling number. and are user param-
eters.
Before collision recognition, the manipulator is controlled by
the proposed method to enhance safety in the event of sudden
collisions. The complete proposed manipulator controller con-
sists of a position controller and a compliance controller, as
shown in Fig. 4. Joint compliance is controlled independently
of the position controller with no effect on the position control.
B. Position Control
A focus on achieving manipulator elasticity inevitably results
in low joint stiffness, which induces low precision in the end-ef-
fector due to vibration during movement. Moreover, the and
matrix of (15) are imprecise terms, as they include PM model
parameters with unavoidable estimation errors. The model pa-
rameters of PM are very changeable terms. They depend on fac-
tors such as the temperature, humidity, and operational stress
of the PM. SMC may be the best solution in this condition. It
guarantees a bounded error of the trajectory tracking problem,
though it cannot assure optimal tracking with almost zero error
[30]. There have been many studies related to SMC, such as
[19], [23] and [31]. Among them, Lilly et al. [23] considered a
specific PM model at a BASMC and is referred to here. Stability
proofing for the position controller can also be seen in [23]. A
836 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 4, JULY 2011

BASMC is a type of SMC that can alleviate chattering by re- TABLE II

placing the discontinuous ‘signum’ function with a continuous TWO-LINK MANIPULATOR KINEMATIC INFORMATION
“saturation” function in the feedback term.
For each joint , assume estimate of from (15)
for known parameter such that

(20)

Assume the control gain is also unknown but upper and

lower bound is known like (21) joint compliance are directly determined from (29) without
the compliance sensor feedback
(21)
(29)
and define
(30)
(22)
such that and ,
where and are determined as (31) by applying
Let the estimation of as
(30) to (28). are at and are at
. are limited by (30) from rear-
(23)
ranged (7) for both bicep and tricep
and consider the sliding surface as with

(24)
(31)
where are the positive real numbers set by user.
In conclusion we can set the control law or of (15) as 2) Compliance Control for the Safety Characteristic: Here,
we aim to maximize the joint compliance for the safety purpose,
so the joint compliance control law are determined as
(25)
Safety constraint: (32)

In that case, the joint compliance are estimated as and

the final pressure inputs to each side are determined as (33) by
(26) (7) and (32)

where is the boundary layer thickness of the sliding surface

for each joint and the is usually defined like (33)

if This is the special one-side actuation control strategy for safety

(27)
if constraint. In case for the need of high stiffness, can be
selected as a more higher value within operational range.
C. Compliance Control
IV. SIMULATION STUDIES
1) Independent Joint Compliance Control: The proposed
controller structure in Fig. 4 make it possible to control the The simulator of two-link manipulator actuated by PM
manipulator’s joint compliance independently of the position was implemented. The manipulator was modeled as shown
control. It is assumed that typically by in Fig. 2, representing a newly designed reverse actuating
setting the nominal position of the manipulator to a zero angle. architecture that reduces the manipulator size in the actual
Joint compliance is then determined via (28) from (13) for each implementation. The kinematic parameters of the manipulator
joint are given in Table II. Link1 and Link2 are the length of the
each link. LinkC1 and LinkC2 denote the length from the joint
to the center of the mass point of each link. The Simulator is
(28) implemented using . The open dynamics engine (ODE)
and OpenGL wrapped by were used for the dynamics
At a moment, the joint compliance depend on only , calculation and 3-D display. An Intel Core2Duo 2 GHz system
because are from joint sensors and are determined by the with 2 GB of RAM was used in this simulation. The sampling
position controller. Then, the control laws for the desired time in all of the simulation was set to 1/60 s. A randomized
CHOI et al.: POSITION AND COMPLIANCE CONTROL OF A PNEUMATIC MUSCLE ACTUATED MANIPULATOR 837

maximum parameter error of 20% for the A and G matrix of

(15) was set during the operation of the manipulator to represent
unpredictable modeling errors

Joint
Joint (34)

In order to show that the proposed method meets the safety re-
quirements, collisions with obstacles were simulated. Initially,
the manipulator was commanded to follow the simple desired
trajectory of (34). A rigid beam was then suddenly placed in a
temporary position with a constraint that the trajectory of the
manipulator must meet the beam, as shown in Fig. 6. Here, the
properties of the beam, including its position, material, and size, Fig. 5. Overview of PBSMC: there are two virtual connections, the virtual cou-
have no special meaning. The manipulator collided with the pling and the proxy, between the end effector and the object.
beam during the simulation and the collision impulse was trans-
ferred to the beam. The measured impact impulses were used as
safety criteria. The nature of the impact impulse is described by
(35) and is the sum of forces transferred to the object

(35)

where means the impulse during collision and means force

delivered to the object. is the collision moment and is the
end of the collision by stopping control of the manipulator.
Different conventional safety criteria exist, including those of
HIC, GSI, and TTI [15], [32]. These indices are based on the ve-
locity or acceleration of a moving object. GSI uses the acceler-
ation of the object and HIC uses its velocity properties. In other
words, they depend on the status and properties of the object. Of
course, a heavy person will be safer than a lighter person when
subjected to the same impact impulses. However, it is also true
that a lower impact impulse from the manipulator decreases the
danger for humans. The present study focuses on such manip-
ulator impacts. A robot is deemed to be safer after the impact
impulse it can deliver to a static object is decreased. Whatever
the static object is, the lower the impact impulse from the ma-
nipulator is, the higher the safety index is. Thus, measuring im-
pact impulse serves as an immediate method for determining the
safety of a robot.
The nominal pressure of static 225 kPa common to all joints
was used as a comparison condition. The maximum pressure of
450 kPa was allowed for both the bicep and tricep PMs, and
a wide operational range is acquired when denotes the
mid-point of the maximum pressure. This is the conventional
method that is used to control PMs regardless of the joint com-
pliance control. In addition, the PBSMC was compared to the
proposed method. The core idea of the PBSMC is represented
in Fig. 5. A PBSMC is type of SMC that increases joint compli-
ance. PBSMC assumes an imaginary object, known as a proxy,
connected to the end effector of the robot by means of virtual
spring-coupling. Essentially, a conventional SMC controls the
position of the proxy and the real end effector is forced to move
to the proxy by the virtual spring-coupling. Virtual spring-cou-
pling increases the compliance of the joints.
The moment after the collision with the beam at 8.95 s, as in-
dicated by the vertical line labeled as “Collision” in Fig. 7, is the
focus for finding the impulse transferred to the obstacle. Fig. 7
Fig. 6. Simulator with obstacle on the way of manipulator’s moving with
counter clockwise direction.
shows increased errors after the moment of collision. The joint
torque values were also increased by the controller to reduce
tracking error, as shown in Fig. 8. Fig. 9 shows an increase in
compliance at the safety constraint when using the IJCC com-
pared to the normal operational configuration( 225 kPa)
and PBSMC. The collision situation is ended when the manip-
ulator stops after recognizing a collision at 9.13 s, as indicated
by the vertical line labeled as “Detection” in Fig. 7. Impulses
during the collision recognition period are used to represent the
impact impulses during collisions. Impact impulses are calcu-
lated from the joint torque differences before and after the colli-
sions. Joint torque values are converted to forces against an ob-
stacle by the kinematics of the manipulator. The final impulse
is the sum of horizontal forces from joint1 and joint2 after as-
suming the horizontal movements of a human. These impulses
were derived as 6.17 Ns at the low compliance of ( 225
kPa), 5.02 Ns at PBSMC and 4.92 Ns at the safety constraint.
The PBSMC also showed feasible safety performance. How-
ever, the PBSMC offset the tracking performance. PBSMC al-
ways had joint errors in the tracking problem owing to the in-
tentionally delayed control due to the virtual spring-coupling.
The long convergence time due to large initial position errors is
a particularly critical issue, as can be seen in the trajectory of
joint2, which is depicted in Fig. 7.
In other words, impact impulses were decreased by roughly
22% with the proposed safety constraint when using the IJCC.
838 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 4, JULY 2011

Fig. 9. Compliance variations at collision simulations. The compliance at the

Fig. 7. Position variations of the collision simulations. The proposed method safety constraint shows more increased joint compliance for all working range
shows good tracking performance. However, it takes long time for the PBSMC contrary to the others.
to converge owing to the large initial position errors at joint2.

Fig. 10. Control system configuration for PMR.

Fig. 8. Applied torques around collisions both at a low compliance state at

(P = 225 kPa), a high compliance state at the safety constraint with IJCC
and PBSMC.

It is clear that the high compliance of the joint at the safety con-
straint with the IJCC can decrease the impact impulse during
collisions. As expected, the tracking performance was also se-
cured, in contrast to the results when using PBSMC. A max-
imum tracking error below 0.025 rad was determined for the
safety constraint with IJCC for all joints. This is feasible per-
formance for the tracking problem, though it is slightly greater
than the maximum error of 0.019 rad at the normal condition.

V. EXPERIMENT
The proposed method was examined on the real robot of
pneumatic muscle robot (PMR). PMR applies the reverse actu-
ation mechanism of Fig. 2. Joint1 of (c) is actuated by the PMs
of part (a) and Joint2 of (d) by the PMs of part (b) in Fig. 11.
Two encoders are attached at each joint for position feedback,
and there are four pneumatic muscles for two revolute joints,
Fig. 11. Schematic of the PMR. The left is the front view and the right is the
side view. (a) is link1 and (b) is link2. (c) and (d) are encoders of the joint1 and
joint2. (e) and (f) are PMs of bicep and tricep. (g) is an air hose.
four external proportional pressure regulators for individual
pneumatic actuators, and one air compressor. The FESTO
CHOI et al.: POSITION AND COMPLIANCE CONTROL OF A PNEUMATIC MUSCLE ACTUATED MANIPULATOR
Fig. 12. Still shots of the collision experiment. Manipulator collide against to
0
the loadcell at 11.95 s through T ( = 10:95 s). (a) T ( 0:41; 0:16). (b) Colli-
sion at 11.95 s.
Fig. 13. Position variations at collision experiments with the safety constraint
and IJCC. It shows good tracking performance before collisions contrary to
PBSMC.
company’s 20 mm diameter pneumatic air muscles are used as
actuators. Also, a control board was developed that consists of
an AVR MCU with a 10 bit, four-channel DAC whose outputs
are inputs to the proportional pressure regulators. The control
frequency was set to 60 Hz, as it was during the simulation
experiments.
Two kinds of experiments were carried out. The first presents
collisions with an object to address the enhanced safety char-
acteristic with the IJCC at the safety constraint. A load-cell was
used to measure the impulse at collision. The second kind of ex-
periment involves a human participant pushing a moving robot
manipulator by hand as an alternative form of human-robot col-
lision.
A. Collision Experiment
The experimental environment pictured in Fig. 12 was con-
structed to measure impact impulses. A load-cell was positioned
839
Fig. 14. Measured forces at collision experiments. Proposed the safety con-
straint with IJCC and PBSMC show low forces after collisions.
Fig. 15. Estimated compliance variations at collision experiments. The com-
pliance at the safety constraint shows more increased joint compliance (3.0–3.4
times of the case of (P = 225 kPa) depending on the position).
on the floor near the projection of joint1. At that point, the hori-
zontal direction impulses were only measured using a load-cell
with the general assumption of the horizontal movement of an
obstacle such as a human. The direction of the impact impulses
and the direction of the movement of the obstacle are identical.
The standard value of a load-cell for a unit weight was decided
by hanging a 10 kg dumbbell.
The motion of the manipulator was given in (34). It could
not reach the desired position because it collided against the
load-cell at 11.92 s. The impulses were measured for collision
recognition periods (11.92–12.66 s) under a normal condition of
( 225 kPa) using the safety constraint and the PBSMC.
The collision detection delay was longer than that of the simula-
tion because of the communication delay in the physical system.
The measured forces are shown in Fig. 14. The forces are in-
creased after collision because of joint errors that occur after
reaching the predefined upper limit within a few iterations. The
forces are kept as static values due to the controller stop after the
collision detection. Impact impulses were decreased to 20.41 Ns
840 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 4, JULY 2011

Fig. 16. Still shots of the pushing experiment. “T n(;  )” indicate a moment at T n when joint1 angle is  and joint2 is  . T n is a time index of Fig. 17. T2
0
indicate the end of the push action. (a) T 1( 0:31; 0:35), (b) T 2(0:15; 0:46), (c) T 2 , (d) T 3(0:28; 0:48), (e) T 4(0:25; 0:41), (f) T 5(0:27; 0:47).
TABLE III
MEASURED IMPACT IMPULSE AND IAE AT COLLISION EXPERIMENTS
with the proposed method compared to 22.39 Ns with PBSMC
and 30.12 Ns at a normal configuration of ( 225 kPa).
This experiment showed that nearly 33% of the impact impulses
were decreased at the proposed safety constraint when using the
IJCC, compared to the normal operational condition. The safety
performance of the PBSMC was nearly identical to that of the
proposed method, but its tracking performance was lower than
that of the proposed method owing to the virtual spring-coupling
of the PBSMC, as depicted in Fig. 13. The impact impulses at
the safety constraint were decreased by virtue of the increased
joint compliance shown in Fig. 15. This result is in good agree-
ment with the simulation results, despite the minor differences
due to measuring noise and minor dimension errors. The posi-
tion control performance was secured with a low rate of error
below 0.028 rad, which is similar to the simulations.
The midpoints of 150 and 300 kPa of were also
accessed using an interval of 25 kPa, which is displayed in
Table III. The range of for comparison was determined by
(30) and the usual experimental results of , the robot and its human operator.
but 225 kPa only applies for the
full swing of . The
experimental results from the various showed that lower
led to lower impact impulses in all collisions. The pro-
posed method maximized the joint compliance resulting in the
smallest impulses. In addition, the proposed method can be
used with a full swing of . Integral of absolute errors
(IAE) during [1 s (settling time) 11.95 s (collision time)] was
derived to measure only the tracking performance in Table III.
Notably, there were not much increase of IAE of joint posi-
tions as decrease with IJCC contrary to PBSMC’s large
errors. In conclusion, the safety characteristic was enhanced
with the proposed method without a great loss of positioning
performance.
Fig. 17. Joint trajectories with pushing actions at T2. Manipulator’s motion
at each time T n((T 1; T 2; T 3; T 4; T 5) = (5.4 s, 6.7 s, 7.0 s, 7.2 s, 9.1 s)) is
shown in Fig. 16.
B. Pushing a Moving Manipulator by Hand
The fundamental objective of this work is to enhance the
safety of humans who are working with robots. An experiment
was devised in which a human pushes the manipulator back-
ward. This is an alternative version of the collision situation be-
tween a human and a robot. Such an interaction would be unde-
sirable for robots using motors for actuation. The resilience of
PM-actuated manipulators results in increased safety for both
It is clear that higher joint compliance results in more elas-
ticity and greater safer compared to lower joint compliance. A
condition satisfying the safety constraint with the IJCC was ap-
plied in this pushing experiment. The motions of the manipu-
lator at moments T1–T5 in Fig. 17 are shown as a series of still
shots in Fig. 16. T2 is in the point at which the human pushed the
manipulator, as the manipulator was moving. A collision with
the human caused a sudden backward motion of the manipulator
at both links, as shown in Fig. 17. This backward motion is pos-
sible as a consequence of the increased compliance of the PM.
This momentary impact causes oscillations, unlike the sustained
collision in the previous experiments. However, the manipulator
stopped a few moments later because the controller stopped.
During the experiments, the joint compliance was maintained
CHOI et al.: POSITION AND COMPLIANCE CONTROL OF A PNEUMATIC MUSCLE ACTUATED MANIPULATOR
Fig. 18. Estimated compliance variations around collision moments T2 and T5
of Fig. 17.
1
Fig. 19. Control laws p around collision moments T2 and T5 of Fig. 17.
It shows the sudden increase after T2 followed by zero control law after the
collision detection.
at high values, as shown in Fig. 18. A joint angle error of almost
0.18 rad ensued directly after the collisions at T2, and the con-
troller subsequently stopped. The control laws in Fig. 19 show
zero values after the collision detection, following steep increase
around the times of the push in an attempt to reduce errors.
It is notable that a PMR with a safety constraint determined by
the IJCC can enhance human safety with high joint compliance
without a significant loss in performance precision.
VI. DISCUSSION
A. Scope of This Work
Briefly, there are two cases in which a human can be injured
by a collision with a robot. The first of these is during the initial
841
collision, and the second is after the initial collision (post-colli-
sion). The initial collision refers to the collision that first oc-
curs between the objects. The initial collision causes unpre-
dictable robot motion, which can then result in other collisions,
or post-collisions. A human can easily be injured by unpredicted
robot motions after the initial collision. To build a genuinely safe
robot, functions to prevent both types of collisions must be con-
sidered.
In this study, only a method to reduce the impact impulse
that occurs upon an initial collision is addressed. Addressing the
safety problems after a collision requires additional study. An
initial collision can damage the sensor system or the mechan-
ical parts of a robot. It is difficult for a controller to accurately
determine environmental information during such an instance
(e.g., the robot’s pose, the relative position of the robot to the
object, or information about the object) even if it is strongly as-
sumed that the system experiences no malfunction caused by
the initial crash. Moreover, unexpected controllable and uncon-
trollable parameters may be added to the main control systems
owing to a completely changed environment.
It is true that post collision hazards are a very important issue
that requires additional study to improve safety between humans
and robots. However, the assurance of safety after the initial col-
lision is beyond the scope of this work, and a basic stop motion
was implemented here to prevent post-collisions.
B. Comparison Study in the Human Demonstration
Demonstrations involving a human participant were executed
and the results are presented in Section V-B. The PBSMC and
BASMC were also tested in a manner similar to that applied for
the IJCC. However, these kinds of experiments are difficult to
regularize. It is difficult to measure experimental data and im-
possible to exactly repeat experiments when human subjects are
involved. This experiment cannot measure the force applied by
the human at the moment of the push and cannot precisely re-
peat the same pushing motion at the same point of contact on
the robot with constant force over the range of various nominal
pressures. Nevertheless, the subjects who pushed the manipu-
lator were able to observe that use of the IJCC results in more
elasticity and greater safety than use of a BASMC. Of course,
it was difficult for the human subjects to observe the compli-
ance difference between using the IJCC and PBSMC. The use
of the IJCC allowed positioning performance superior to that
when using PBSMC.
VII. CONCLUSION
It is a fundamental proposition that a robot must never injure
a human, and robots are considered to be safer when they offer
greater joint compliance. In relation to this, a joint compliance
control method without a significant loss of precision perfor-
mance in the manipulator was addressed in this work. PM with
intrinsic elasticity was used as a basic actuator in an antago-
nistic configuration. The proposed unified control framework,
which uses an IJCC and a SMC for the manipulator actuated by
PM, was utilized to meet acceptable safety characteristics. The
proposed model offers enhanced safety relative to conventional
works in both simulations and experiments involving collisions
with obstacles.
842 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 4, JULY 2011
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Tae-Yong Choi (S’10) was born in Busan, Korea, in
1977. He received the B.S. degree in electronic and
electrical engineering from Pohang University of Sci-
ence and Technology (Postech), Pohang, Korea, in
2003, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering
from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Tech-
nology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in 2010.
Currently, he is a Senior Engineer with Samsung
Electronics, Suwon, Korea. His current research in-
terests include safe robot, robotics, machine vision,
and machine learning.
Byoung-Suk Choi (S’08) was born in Busan, Korea,
in 1981. He received the B.S. and M.S. degree in
electrical engineering from Pusan National Univer-
sity, Busan, Korea, in 2004 and 2006, respectively.
He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree from
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Tech-
nology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea.
Currently, he is taking part in a research project of
the Unmanned Technology Research Center (UTRC)
supported by the Agency for Defense Development
(ADD), Korea. He is also taking part in a research
project of the National Robotics Research Center for Robot Intelligence Tech-
nology supported by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy of Korea. His re-
search interests include mobile robot.
Kap-Ho Seo (M’09) was born in Pusan, Korea,
in 1974. He received the B.S. degree in electrical
engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea, in
1999, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea,
in 2001 and 2009, respectively.
Since 2009, he has been a Senior Researcher with
the Pohang Institute of Intelligent Robotics (PIRO),
Pohang, Korea. He has worked in developing robotic
system for the elderly and disabled. His current re-
search interests include embedded system, neural network, vision-based mobile
robot, and rehabilitation robot system.