Design and Control of a Variable Stiffness Actuator Based on Adjustable Moment Arm.

For tasks that require robot–environment interaction, stiffness control is important to ensure stable contact motion and collision safety. The variable stiffness approach has been used to address this type of control. We propose a hybrid variable stiffness actuator (HVSA), which is a variable stiffness unit design. The proposed HVSA is composed of a hybrid control module based on an adjustable moment-arm mechanism, and a drive module with two motors. By controlling the relative motion of gears in the hybrid control module, position and stiffness of a joint can be simultaneously controlled. The HVSA provides a wide range of joint stiffness due to the nonlinearity provided by the adjustable moment arm. Furthermore, the rigid mode, which behaves as a conventional stiff joint, can be implemented to improve positioning accuracy when a robot handles a heavy object. In this paper, the mechanical design features and related analysis are explained. We show that the HVSA can provide a wide range of stiffness and rapid responses according to changes in the stiffness of a joint under varying loads by experiments. The effectiveness of the rigid mode is verified by some experiments on position tracking under high-load conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]