Mechanical design and analysis of a novel variable stiffness actuator with symmetrical pivot adjustment

Abstract

The safety of human–robot interaction is an essential requirement for designing collaborative robotics. Thus, this paper aims to design a novel variable stiffness actuator (VSA) that can provide safer physical human–robot interaction for collaborative robotics. VSA follows the idea of modular design, mainly including a variable stiffness module and a drive module. The variable stiffness module transmits the motion from the drive module in a roundabout manner, making the modularization of VSA possible. As the key component of the variable stiffness module, a stiffness adjustment mechanism with a symmetrical structure is applied to change the positions of a pair of pivots in two levers linearly and simultaneously, which can eliminate the additional bending moment caused by the asymmetric structure. The design of the double-deck grooves in the lever allows the pivot to move freely in the groove, avoiding the geometric constraint between the parts. Consequently, the VSA stiffness can change from zero to infinity as the pivot moves from one end of the groove to the other. To facilitate building a manipulator in the future, an expandable electrical system with a distributed structure is also proposed. Stiffness calibration and control experiments are performed to evaluate the physical performance of the designed VSA. Experiment results show that the VSA stiffness is close to the theoretical design stiffness. Furthermore, the VSA with a proportional–derivative feedback plus feedforward controller exhibits a fast response for stiffness regulation and a good performance for position tracking.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

variable stiffness actuator / variable stiffness module / drive module / symmetrical structure / double-deck grooves / expandable electrical system

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFB1300400) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51805107).

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