Safety performance of a variable stiffness actuator for collaborative robots

Juan Sébastian Sandoval Arevalo (1) , Med Amine Laribi (2) , Said Zeghloul (2) , Marc Arsicault (2) , Gérard Poisson (3)

1 PPrime [Poitiers] - Institut Pprime [UPR 3346]
2 COBRA - Cobotique, Bio-ing Robotique pour l'Assistance [Institut Pprime]
3 IRAUS - Département Images, Robotique, Automatique et Signal [Orléans]

Integration of active compliant joints in a robotic system contributes to enhance safety in physical human-robot interactions. In this paper we study the behavior of a variable stiffness actuator -V2SOM-, proposed in the context of the SISCob project. We describe the working principle and design of the proposed system. Furthermore, the dynamic modeling, including its nonlinear stiffness law, is presented. A preliminary study is conducted to evaluate the safety performance of a collaborative robot using the proposed mechanism. Thus, a dynamic simulator has been developed to integrate the compliant behavior of V2SOM in two joints of a Kuka iiwa robot. In order to evaluate the safety performance of the system, some following-trajectory tasks are executed in a planar workspace whereas unexpected collisions are produced with an unknown environment. The results presented in this paper show the effectiveness of V2SOM, enhancing the safety performance of the robot.

Mots clés: Variable stiffness actuator (VSA); Collaborative robots; Safe physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI)

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Juan Sébastian Sandoval Arevalo, Med Amine Laribi, Said Zeghloul, Marc Arsicault, Gérard Poisson. Safety performance of a variable stiffness actuator for collaborative robots. 27th International Conference on Robotics in Alpe Adria Danube Region (RAAD2018), Jun 2018, Patras, Greece. ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-00232-9_4⟩. ⟨hal-01975355⟩