Development of dislocation joint to perform mechanical softness

Abstract

In recent years, robots' activity in human-robot-coexistence environment is desired. In such environment, it is very important to avoid giving a damage to human or objects from such robots. Therefore passive compliance joints (that gives mechanical softness) are attracted recently. In this research, we propose a kind of passive compliance joint that softens a shock of a collision using aluminum corn clutch mechanism. The clutch slides when large external force is given to it, and the threshold value of the force can be adjusted automatically. We checked a performance of joints by applying it to a small robot arm. Furthermore, we have adopted the arm as a satellite arm to support main arm's work. In this paper, we introduce "a mechanism of the joint", "a verification of validity using experiments" and "an application example of the joint".