2A1-G02 Visco-Elastic Mechanism Design for Small and Lightweight Flexible Joint Manipulator

Abstract

There has been the issue to develop a small-sized and light weight visco-elastic mechanism for the human-symbiotic robot which can absorb the contact force and follow the human motion. In this paper we proposed the visco-elastic mechanism which is consisted of the GUMMETAL torsion bar and rotary disk damper. Space-efficiency of proposed mechanism is high. GUMMETAL has low elastic modulus and high strength, and so short and slim shaped torsion bar can undergo the enormous elastic deformation. As the result proposed mechanism is small-sized and light weight, and high flexibility. Comparing to conventional design, we confirmed that the proposed mechanism can make flexible joint more small-sized and light weight.