An Elastic Joint Manipulator for a Human friendly robot

This articles describes a novel design elastic joint manipulator for a mobile robot, which works in an office environment with humans. The primary goal of this manipulator design is safeness on collision and contact. To achieve this, each joint is made of an elastic element and this is driver with a high ratio gear tram. The performance was verified, however, it has a serious drawback. It produce vibration, due to the elastic joints and high ratio gear train. We found that a sliding mode controller has an excellent performance for reducing such vibration. Results of computer simulation and experiments are shown.