The control of the standard pneumatic muscle actuators is provided by increasing the air pressure in the one artificial muscle, while reducing the pressure in the second (antagonist) artificial muscle. The paper contains information about the control and basic properties of the rotary actuator based on pneumatic artificial muscles. It presents equations for the values of the actuator arm displacement depending on an input pressure; it shows the static characteristics of the actuator and the utilization of the muscle contraction. Pneumatic artificial muscles are connected in an antagonistic system through an oval centrally symmetric pulley. Due to the fact that with increasing rotating of actuator arm the torque decrease from the both artificial muscles; the stiffness of the actuator also decreasing in both directions. The proposed method of the present control in this paper has resulted in a small increase of torque of the rotary muscle actuator and thus adequate and symmetric stiffness of actuator.