Hammerstein model for hysteresis characteristics of pneumatic muscle actuators

As a kind of novel compliant actuators, pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs) have been recently used in wearable devices for rehabilitation, industrial manufacturing and other fields due to their excellent actuation characteristics such as high power/weight ratio, safety and inherent compliance. However, the strong nonlinearity and asymmetrical hysteresis cause difficulties in the accurate control of robots actuated by PMAs. In this paper, a method for hysteresis modeling of PMA based on Hammerstein model is proposed, which introduces the BP neural network into the hysteretic system. In order to overcome the limitation of BP neural network’s single-valued mapping, an extended space input method is adapted while the Modified Prandtl–Ishlinskii model is applied to characterize the hysteretic phenomenon. A conventional PID control is implemented to track the trajectory of PMA with and without the feed-forward hysteresis compensation based on Hammerstein model, and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the designed model which has the advantages of high precision and easy identification.