Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBOTICS RESEARCH
Volume 29, Issue 5, Pages 571-584Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0278364909353956
Keywords
biologically-inspired robots; compliance and impedance control; force control; human Safety robot design; mechanism design; physical human-robot interaction; pneumatic systems; robot safety
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The increasing demand for physical interaction between humans and robots has led to an interest in robots that guarantee safe behavior when human contact occurs. However, attaining established levels of performance while ensuring safety creates formidable challenges in mechanical design, actuation, sensing and control. To promote safety without compromising performance, a human-friendly robotic arm has been developed using the concept of hybrid actuation. The new design employs high-power, low-impedance pneumatic artificial muscles augmented with small electrical actuators, distributed compact pressure regulators with proportional valves, and hollow plastic links. The experimental results show that significant performance improvement can be achieved with hybrid actuation over a system with pneumatic muscles alone. In this paper we evaluate the safety of the new robot arm through experiments and simulation, demonstrating that its inertia/power characteristics surpass those of previous human-friendly robots we have developed.
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