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In heavy impact situations, damping injection directly onto the link of an articulated soft robot is challenging and usually requires high actuator torques at the moment of impact.
In this work, we discuss the underlying reasons and analyze the performance limitations that arise when implementing basic impedance elements, such as springs and dampers, via the Elastic Structure Preserving Impedance (ESPi) control framework.
Using the insights obtained, we present a way to design impedance controllers with a damping design based on dynamic expansions. Inspired by shock absorber design and the muscle-tendon model, the presented damping layout requires significantly smaller actuator torques in situations where the robot is exposed to hard impacts.
Implementation is facilitated by the ESPi control framework, resulting in a physically intuitive impedance design. The resulting closed loop system can be interpreted as an interconnection of passive Euler Lagrange systems, again yielding a passive system. The passive nature of the design ensures stability in the free movement situation and ensures that the robot can communicate robustly and safely with its environment. The work focuses on robotic systems without inertial coupling between the motor and the connection dynamics. Experimental results obtained with the presented design on a dedicated testbed for elastic actuators (SEA) are reported and discussed.
The article was published in the 2021 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
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