A new actuation approach for human friendly robot design

In recent years, many successful robotic manipulator designs have been introduced. However, there remains the challenge of designing a manipulator. that possesses the inherent safety characteristics necessary for human-friendly robotics. In this paper, we present a new actuation approach that has the requisite characteristics for inherent safety while maintaining the performance expected of modern designs. By drastically reducing the effective impedance of the manipulator we show that uncontrolled impact loads can be reduced by an order of magnitude or more, as compared to conventional manipulator designs. A discussion of the actuation topology is presented along with analytical and experimental results validating the efficacy of our approach.