Modeling of pneumatic artificial muscle using a hybrid artificial neural network approach

Pneumatic Artificial Muscle (PAM) actuator has been widely used in medical and rehabilitation robots, owing to its high power-to-weight ratio and inherent safety characteristics. However, the PAM exhibits highly non-linear and time variant behavior, due to compressibility of air, use of elastic-viscous material as core tube and pantographic motion of the PAM outer sheath. It is difficult to obtain a precise model using analytical modeling methods. This paper proposes a new Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based modeling approach for modeling PAM actuator. To obtain higher precision ANN model, three different approaches, namely, Back Propagation (BP) algorithm, Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach and hybrid approach combing BP algorithm with Modified Genetic Algorithm (MGA) are developed to optimize ANN parameters. Results show that the ANN model using the GA approach outperforms the BP algorithm, and the hybrid approach shows the best performance among the three approaches.