Research

Over the past decades industrial robot manipulators have expanded throughout the automation landscape with their high degree of repeatability and accuracy. For safety reasons these robots are not allowed to share their workspace along with humans, which limits the various tasks that can be performed by a human-robot collaboration. Cobots are designed to work alongside a human being. Although active force control devices offer design simplicity, passive force control joints are inherently safer at a cost of positional accuracy. This paper presents a new kind of   vSEA as a revolute joint actuator capable of servo-controlling the joint stiffness, mathematical model, impact characteristics, and accuracy performance as a function of joint speed and stiffness which leads to the trade-off between joint speed and accuracy from the safety point of view.