Design of redundant drive joint with adjustable stiffness and damping mechanism to improve joint admittance

Improving admittance of robotic joints is the key issue for making rehabilitation robots safe. This paper describes a design of redundant drive joint (RD-joint) which allows greater flexibility in the design of robotic mechanisms. The design strategy of the RD-joint employs a systematic approach which consists of 1) adopting a redundant joint mechanism with internal kinematical redundancy to reduce effective joint inertia, and 2) adopting an adjustable admittance mechanism with a novel crosslink reduction mechanism and mechanical springs and dampers as a passive second actuator. First, the basic concepts used to construct the redundant drive joint mechanism are explained, in particular the method that allows a reduction in effective inertia at the output joint. The basic structure of the RD-joint is introduced based on the idea of reduced inertia along with a method to include effective stiffness and damping. Then, the basic design of the adjustable admittance mechanism is described. Finally, a prototype of RD-joint is described and its expected characteristics are discussed.

Paper presented at: IEEE 11th International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR 2009), Kyoto, Japan, 23-26 June 2009.