First Advisor

Alexander Hunt

Term of Graduation

Summer 2023

Date of Publication

8-29-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Mechanical Engineering

Department

Mechanical and Materials Engineering

Language

English

Subjects

Robotics

DOI

10.15760/etd.3655

Physical Description

1 online resource (vii, 54 pages)

Abstract

Braided Pneumatic Actuators (BPAs) are used widely in robotics as artificial muscles because of their similar characteristics to biological muscles. When a BPA is pressurized, it expands in the radial direction and contracts in the longitudinal direction. The contraction generates a pulling force that is dependent on the input pressure and BPA length. Biological muscle also behaves in the same way where a pulling force is generated on a contraction. To control BPAs on a robot, the real-time pressure and length measurements are necessary. In this dissertation, I present a new method to measure length of BPAs in real-time using a time-of-flight IR sensor. The IR sensor VL53L0X is integrated inside an air-tight housing so that it can be mounted to one end of a BPA during pressurization. The sensor uses I2C communication protocol, hence only two wires are needed to be connected to the bus line for communication with a microcontroller. Additionally, more sensors can be added to a bus without significantly impacting the sampling delay performance. The proposed Time-of-Flight sensor has an average of 8.5% Root Mean Square Percentage Error, and the sampling frequency is up to 50Hz.

Rights

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/40838

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