Low-Impedance Displacement Sensors for Intuitive Physical Human-Robot Interaction: Motion Guidance, Design, and Prototyping

This article provides a general framework for the use of low-impedance displacement sensors mounted on the links of a serial robot to provide an intuitive physical human-robot interaction. A general formulation is developed to handle the motion guidance problem, i.e., the mapping of the measured motion of the sensors into the required robot joint motions to provide intuitive responsiveness. The formulation is general and can be applied to any architecture of serial robot with any number of displacement sensors each having an arbitrary number of degrees of freedom. Then, the design of a novel three-degree-of-freedom low-impedance displacement sensor is presented as a particularly effective instantiation of the general concept. Partial force balancing is used to reduce the required elastic return action, thereby ensuring the low impedance of the interaction. A prototype of a three-degree-of-freedom displacement sensor is then introduced. Two such sensors are mounted on the links of a custom-built five-degree-of-freedom robot in order to demonstrate the proposed approach. Experimental results are provided and comparisons with other collaborative robots are given. It is shown that the proposed sensors and motion guidance approach yield very intuitive low-impedance interaction involving very low interaction forces.

Automated summary

This article presents a general framework for using low-impedance displacement sensors on serial robot links for intuitive physical human-robot interaction. A novel three-degree-of-freedom low-impedance displacement sensor design is introduced, showing very intuitive low-impedance interaction involving very low interaction forces.