AIR2, a pneumatically actuated parallel robot has two degrees of freedom for making applications and drop objects

A two degrees-of-freedom pneumatically driven parallel robot has been developed for pick-and-place of payloads comprised between 5 and 20 kg using standard double acting cylinders cheaper than electrical motors. After the general presentation of the robot, the actuator models are developed and a novel control strategy is introduced based on a cascade scheme with a predictive position controller and an inner H(infinity) force control. Some experimental results are then presented and analyzed in order to show the effectiveness of the controllers.