Morgan Quigley, Alan Asbeck, and Andrew Y. Ng（摩根奎格利Alan Asbeck和安德鲁·y Ng）.pdfVIP

A Low-cost Compliant 7-DOF Robotic Manipulator Morgan Quigley, Alan Asbeck, and Andrew Y. Ng Abstract— We present the design of a new low-cost series- elastic robotic arm. The arm is unique in that it achieves reasonable performance for the envisioned tasks (backlash-free, sub-3mm repeatability, moves at 1.5m/s, 2kg payload) but with a significantly lower parts cost than comparable manipulators. The paper explores the design decisions and tradeoffs made in achieving this combination of price and performance. A new, human-safe design is also described: the arm uses stepper motors with a series-elastic transmission for the proximal four degrees of freedom (DOF), and non-series-elastic robotics servos for the distal three DOF. Tradeoffs of the design are discussed, especially in the areas of human safety and control bandwidth. The arm is used to demonstrate pancake cooking (pouring batter, flipping pancakes), using the intrinsic compliance of the arm to aid in interaction with objects. I. INTRODUCTION Fig. 1. The low-cost compliant manipulator described in this paper. Many robotic manipulators are very expensive, due to A spatula was used as the end effector in the demonstration application high-precision actuators and custom machining of compo- described in this paper. For ease of prototyping, lasercut plywood was used nents. We propose that robotic manipulation research can as the primary structural material. advance more rapidly if robotic arms of reasonable perfor- mance were greatly reduced in price. Increased affordability can lead to wider adoption, which in turn can lead to arms but at a drastically lowe