A novel self-decoupled four degree-of-freedom wrist force/torque sensor

Haptic based human-computer interaction (HapHCI) system is currently the frontier of robot research, which is widely used in virtual reality, rehabilitation, entertainment, and so on. The measurement of the multi-dimensional interactive force between human hand and interaction device such as hand -controller, joystick, limb rehabilitation device, etc., becomes an important component of the HapHCI. However, the existing commercial 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) force sensors are too expensive and often over designed for HapHCI not only in axis but also in bandwidth. In this paper, a novel 4 DOF wrist force/torque sensor suitable for HapHCI is developed, which is self-decoupled without calculating the decoupling matrix. Thus this type of wrist force/torque can be called as direct output force sensor, which is quite different from the conventional ones called as indirect output force sensor. Its elastic body has a simple geometry which is easy to fabricate, and half the number of strain gauges compared to the existing commercial 6 DOF force/torque sensor. So the 4 DOF force/torque sensor is much lower in cost. This paper introduces the elastic body structure of the wrist force/ torque sensors, and analyses the self-decoupled principle in detail. A prototype sensor is fabricated, and the calibration test results of the 4 DOF force/torque sensor validate the analysis and demonstrate the advantage of such a sensor. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.