A New Actuation Approach for Human Friendly Robot Design

In recent years, many successful robotic manipulator designs have been introduced. However, there remains the challenge of designing a manipulator that possesses the inherent safety characteristics necessary for human-centered robotics. In this paper, we present a new actuation approach that has the requisite characteristics for inherent safety while maintaining the performance expected of modern designs. By drastically reducing the effective impedance of the manipulator while maintaining high-frequency torque capability, we show that the competing design requirements of performance and safety can be successfully integrated into a single manipulation system.

[1]  R. H. Cannon,et al.  Initial Experiments on the End-Point Control of a Flexible One-Link Robot , 1984 .

[2]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  A unified approach for motion and force control of robot manipulators: The operational space formulation , 1987, IEEE J. Robotics Autom..

[3]  Ian W. Hunter,et al.  A comparative analysis of actuator technologies for robotics , 1992 .

[4]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  A new actuation system for high-performance torque-controlled manipulators , 1993 .

[5]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Design and development of high-performance torque-controlled joints , 1995, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[6]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Inertial Properties in Robotic Manipulation: An Object-Level Framework , 1995, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[7]  Matthew M. Williamson,et al.  Series elastic actuators , 1995, Proceedings 1995 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Human Robot Interaction and Cooperative Robots.

[8]  John Kenneth Salisbury,et al.  Parallel-Coupled Micro-Macro Actuators , 1996, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[9]  Robert D. Lorenz,et al.  Resonant load control methods for industrial servo drives , 2000, Conference Record of the 2000 IEEE Industry Applications Conference. Thirty-Fifth IAS Annual Meeting and World Conference on Industrial Applications of Electrical Energy (Cat. No.00CH37129).

[10]  David W. Robinson,et al.  Design and analysis of series elasticity in closed-loop actuator force control , 2000 .

[11]  Alin Albu-Schäffer,et al.  On a new generation of torque controlled light-weight robots , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[12]  Antonio Bicchi,et al.  Compliant design for intrinsic safety: general issues and preliminary design , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[13]  Alin Albu-Schäffer,et al.  DLR's torque-controlled light weight robot III-are we reaching the technological limits now? , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[14]  Michael R. Zinn,et al.  A New Actuation Approach for Human Friendly Robot Design , 2004, Int. J. Robotics Res..