Development of human-friendly robot's waist with passive collision force suppression mechanism

摘要

This paper describes the development of a waist for a human friendly robot. The waist consists of pitch, roll, and yaw axes at which a passive collision force suppression mechanism is installed. The whole robot body of the robot is also covered by an air cushion bag capable of reducing impact force. When a collision between an object and the robot occurs, the collision/contact force is first suppressed by the air cushion bag. However, if a larger collision force is exerted on the robot, the passive collision force suppression mechanism is activated, and the force is reduced to almost zero. Using the human friendly robot, many collision experiments have been conducted, and the effectiveness of the collision force suppression mechanism is confirmed.