Design and Preliminary Testing of a Magnetic Spring as an Energy-Storing System for Reduced Power Consumption of a Humanoid Arm

The increasing use of robots in the industry, the growing energy prices, and higher environmental awareness have driven research to find new solutions for reducing energy consumption. In additional, in most robotic tasks, energy is used to overcome the forces of gravity, but in a few industrial applications, the force of gravity is used as a source of energy. For this reason, the use of magnetic springs with actuators may reduce the energy consumption of robots performing trajectories due their high-hardness magnetic properties of energy storage. Accordingly, this paper proposes a magnetic spring configuration as an energy-storing system for a two DoF humanoid arm. Thus, an integration of the magnetic spring system in the robot is described. A control strategy is proposed to enable autonomous use. In this paper, the proposed device is modeled and analyzed with simulations as: mechanical energy consumption and kinetic energy rotational and multibody dynamics. Furthermore, a prototype was manufactured and validated experimentally. A preliminary test to check the interaction between the magnetic spring system with the mechanism and the trajectory performance was carried out. Finally, an energy consumption comparison with and without the magnetic spring is also presented.