Exploring the dynamic properties and motion reproducibility of a small upper-body humanoid robot with 13-DOF pneumatic actuation for data-driven control

Pneumatically-actuated anthropomorphic robots with high degrees of freedom (DOF) offer significant potential for physical human-robot interaction. However, precise control of pneumatic actuators is challenging due to their inherent nonlinearities. This paper presents the development of a compact 13-DOF upper-body humanoid robot. To assess the feasibility of an effective controller, we first investigate its key dynamic properties, such as actuation time delays, and confirm that the system exhibits highly reproducible behavior. Leveraging this reproducibility, we implement a preliminary data-driven controller for a 4-DOF arm subsystem based on a multilayer perceptron with explicit time delay compensation. The network was trained on random movement data to generate pressure commands for tracking arbitrary trajectories. Comparative evaluations with a traditional PID controller demonstrate superior trajectory tracking performance, highlighting the potential of data-driven approaches for controlling complex, high-DOF pneumatic robots.