Soft robotic gloves were designed to aid the rehabilitation process with hand pathologies and coordination of gripping exercises. The main issue in soft robotic actuators is to design a control strategy to overcome deformation in grasping exercises. In this paper, a new soft robotic actuator is developed to be protected against swell and deformation. This soft robotic glove is equipped with two sensors; these sensors make the robotic glove more intelligent. In the hardware, it was used two sensors in the new closed-loop method which include an air pressure sensor in the figure tip and a flex sensor to measure finger flexion rate. Two closed-loop control system is developed to regulate inlet air pressure and regulate the angle of the fingers for the soft robotic actuator. A Model-Based Design (MBD) method is presented as a very cost-effective, favorable, and robust method. PID programming on an embedded controller is applied by MBD approach. The soft actuator process contains a molded wooden chamber and fiber reinforcement. Experimental results show that the proposed soft robotic has a soft gripping mechanism, accurate gripping against various objects during daily activities.
Keywords: Model-based design; Rehabilitation robots; Soft actuator; Soft robotic glove; Two parallel sensors.
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