Anthropomorphic Low-Inertia High-Stiffness Manipulator for High-Speed Safe Interaction

• Published in: IEEE transactions on robotics Vol. 33; no. 6; pp. 1358 - 1374
• Main Author: Kim, Yong-Jae
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Amplification; Anthropomorphic manipulator; Anthropomorphism; Collision avoidance; Collision mitigation; Degrees of freedom; Elbow (anatomy); High speed; Human engineering; Human-robot interaction; Inertia; Manipulators; Motion control; Robot arms; Robots; safe robots; Safety; Stiffness tests; tension-amplification mechanism
• ISSN: 1552-3098; 1941-0468
• DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2017.2732354

In this paper, a manipulator is proposed for safe human-robot interaction at high speed. The manipulator has both low mass and inertia and high stiffness and strength. It is basically a cable-driven manipulator; nevertheless, by using a unique lightweight tension-amplification mechanism, the manipulator retains high stiffness and strength. The joint stiffness, which is strongly related to the motion control performance, is amplified by the quadratic order. Both 1-degree of freedom (DOF) and 3-DOF joint mechanisms using the tension-amplification mechanism are presented and combined to develop a 7-DOF anthropomorphic manipulator named LIMS. The mass and inertia beyond the shoulder were 2.24 kg and 0.599 kg·m 2 , respectively, which are lower than those of a human. The stiffness of the developed elbow joint was 1410 N·m/rad, which is approximately seven times higher than that of a human. Considering the ratio of stiffness to inertia, the manipulator is expected to show a control performance that is comparable to those of conventional industrial manipulators. Comprehensive experiments, including joint stiffness tests and high-speed interaction tests, were conducted to verify the feasibility of the developed manipulator.