scholarly journals Safe pHRI via the Variable Stiffness Safety-Oriented Mechanism (V2SOM): Simulation and Experimental Validations

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 3810
Author(s):  
Younsse Ayoubi ◽  
Med Amine Laribi ◽  
Marc Arsicault ◽  
Saïd Zeghloul

Robots are gaining a foothold day-by-day in different areas of people’s lives. Collaborative robots (cobots) need to display human-like dynamic performance. Thus, the question of safety during physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) arises. Herein, we propose making serial cobots intrinsically compliant to guarantee safe pHRI via our novel designed device, V2SOM (variable stiffness safety-oriented mechanism). Integrating this new device at each rotary joint of the serial cobot ensures a safe pHRI and reduces the drawbacks of making robots compliant. Thanks to its two continuously linked functional modes—high and low stiffness—V2SOM presents a high inertia decoupling capacity, which is a necessary condition for safe pHRI. The high stiffness mode eases the control without disturbing the safety aspect. Once a human–robot (HR) collision occurs, a spontaneous and smooth shift to low stiffness mode is passively triggered to safely absorb the impact. To highlight V2SOM’s effect in safety terms, we consider two complementary safety criteria: impact force (ImpF) criterion and head injury criterion (HIC) for external and internal damage evaluation of blunt shocks, respectively. A pre-established HR collision model is built in Matlab/Simulink (v2018, MathWorks, France) in order to evaluate the latter criterion. This paper presents the first V2SOM prototype, with quasi-static and dynamic experimental evaluations.

Robotics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Younsse Ayoubi ◽  
Med Laribi ◽  
Said Zeghloul ◽  
Marc Arsicault

Unlike “classical” industrial robots, collaborative robots, known as cobots, implement a compliant behavior. Cobots ensure a safe force control in a physical interaction scenario within unknown environments. In this paper, we propose to make serial robots intrinsically compliant to guarantee safe physical human–robot interaction (pHRI), via our novel designed device called V2SOM, which stands for Variable Stiffness Safety-Oriented Mechanism. As its name indicates, V2SOM aims at making physical human–robot interaction safe, thanks to its two basic functioning modes—high stiffness mode and low stiffness mode. The first mode is employed for normal operational routines. In contrast, the low stiffness mode is suitable for the safe absorption of any potential blunt shock with a human. The transition between the two modes is continuous to maintain a good control of the V2SOM-based cobot in the case of a fast collision. V2SOM presents a high inertia decoupling capacity which is a necessary condition for safe pHRI without compromising the robot’s dynamic performances. Two safety criteria of pHRI were considered for performance evaluations, namely, the impact force (ImpF) criterion and the head injury criterion (HIC) for, respectively, the external and internal damage evaluation during blunt shocks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhuang Zhang ◽  
Genliang Chen ◽  
Weicheng Fan ◽  
Wei Yan ◽  
Lingyu Kong ◽  
...  

Abstract Devices with variable stiffness are drawing more and more attention with the growing interests of human-robot interaction, wearable robotics, rehabilitation robotics, etc. In this paper, the authors report on the design, analysis and experiments of a stiffness variable passive compliant device whose structure is a combination of a reconfigurable elastic inner skeleton and an origami shell. The main concept of the reconfigurable skeleton is to have two elastic trapezoid four-bar linkages arranged in orthogonal. The stiffness variation generates from the passive deflection of the elastic limbs and is realized by actively switching the arrangement of the leaf springs and the passive joints in a fast, simple and straightforward manner. The kinetostatics and the compliance of the device are analyzed based on an efficient approach to the large deflection problem of the elastic links. A prototype is fabricated to conduct experiments for the assessment of the proposed concept. The results show that the prototype possesses relatively low stiffness under the compliant status and high stiffness under the stiff status with a status switching speed around 80 ms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu She ◽  
Siyang Song ◽  
Hai-Jun Su ◽  
Junmin Wang

Abstract In this paper, we study the effects of mechanical compliance on safety in physical human–robot interaction (pHRI). More specifically, we compare the effect of joint compliance and link compliance on the impact force assuming a contact occurred between a robot and a human head. We first establish pHRI system models that are composed of robot dynamics, an impact contact model, and head dynamics. These models are validated by Simscape simulation. By comparing impact results with a robotic arm made of a compliant link (CL) and compliant joint (CJ), we conclude that the CL design produces a smaller maximum impact force given the same lateral stiffness as well as other physical and geometric parameters. Furthermore, we compare the variable stiffness joint (VSJ) with the variable stiffness link (VSL) for various actuation parameters and design parameters. While decreasing stiffness of CJs cannot effectively reduce the maximum impact force, CL design is more effective in reducing impact force by varying the link stiffness. We conclude that the CL design potentially outperforms the CJ design in addressing safety in pHRI and can be used as a promising alternative solution to address the safety constraints in pHRI.


Author(s):  
Yu She ◽  
Hai-Jun Su ◽  
Cheng Lai ◽  
Deshan Meng

In this paper, we present a tunable stiffness robot link for safe human-robot interaction. Stiffness of a manipulator determines the injury levels of a human from an impact between robots and operators, given a specific impact velocity. Compliance of a robot manipulator includes joint compliance and link compliance. Variable stiffness design from the viewpoint of actuators have been widely studied, while adjustable stiffness robotic link in the application of human robot interaction is rare in literatures. This paper details the design of a tunable stiffness robotic manipulator via four bar linkages which are actuated by servo motors. A 3D model of the morphing beam is constructed, and a robot which is made up of 3 morphing arms is designed. Prototypes using 3D printer are fabricated. Numerous tests have been done, and the results show that the stiffness is able to change 3.6 times given a morphing angle of π/4. Given an impact velocity of 2.2 m/s, the impact tests show that the acceleration has a 19.4% decrease comparing the curved beam and straight beam, and the head injury criteria (HIC) significantly decreases from 210.3 m5/2s−4 to 150.3 m5/2s−4, which is much safer to the operators. This paper explores the research of tunable stiffness on robotic links in the application of human robot interaction, expanding the research arena with regarding to human safe robot design.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Siyang Song ◽  
Yu She ◽  
Junmin Wang ◽  
Hai-Jun Su

Abstract Variable stiffness robots may provide an effective way of trading-off between safety and speed during physical human–robot interaction. In such a compromise, the impact force reduction capability and maximum safe speed are two key performance measures. To quantitatively study how dynamic parameters such as mass, inertia, and stiffness affect these two performance measures, performance indices for impact force reduction capability and maximum speed of variable stiffness robots are proposed based on the impact ellipsoid in this paper. The proposed performance indices consider different impact directions and kinematic configurations in the large. Combining the two performance indices, the global performance of variable stiffness robots is defined. A two-step optimization method is designed to achieve this global performance. A two-link variable stiffness link robot example is provided to show the efficacy of the proposed method.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-92
Author(s):  
T. I. Minina ◽  
V. V. Skalkin

Russia’s entry into the top five economies of the world depends, among other things, on the development of the financial sector, being a necessary condition for the economic growth of a developed macroeconomic and macro-financial system. The financial sector represents a system of relationships for the effective collection and distribution of economic resources, their deployment according to public demand, reducing the risk of overproduction and overheating of the economy.Therefore, the subject of the research is the financial sector of the Russian economy.The purpose of the research was to formulate an approach to alleviating the risks of increasing financial costs in the real sector of the economy by reducing the impact of endogenous risks expressed as financial asset “bubbles” using the experience of developed countries in the monetary policy.The paper analyzes a macroeconomic model applied to the financial sector. It is established that the economic growth is determined by the growth and, more important, the qualitative development of the financial sector, which leads to two phenomena: overproduction in the real sector and an increase in asset prices in the financial sector, with a debt load in both the real and financial sectors. This results in decreasing the interest rate of the mega-regulator to near-zero values. In this case, since the mechanisms of the conventional monetary policy do not work, the unconventional monetary policy is used when the mega-regulator buys out derivative financial instruments from systemically important institutions. As a conclusion, given deflationally low rates, it is proposed that the megaregulator should issue its own derivative financial instruments and place them in the financial market.


Author(s):  
Naval Garg

The paper aims to empirically explore the impact of six dimensions of workplace spirituality on three types of organizational commitment. Six dimensions of workplace spirituality used for the study are Swadharma, Lokasangraha, authenticity, sense of community, Karma capital and Krityagyata. Components of organizational commitment are affective, normative and continuance commitment. A sample of 541 employees working in various organizations was given a structured questionnaire. Correlations, regressions and Necessary Condition Analysis(NCA) were carried out. The paper has enriched the field of workplace spirituality by contributing to existing literature via adding one more construct of Indian spirituality i.e. Krityagyata. Paper concludes that workplace spirituality climate helps in promoting organizational commitment. NCA elicited necessity of various dimensions of workplace spirituality for healthy organizational commitment.


Author(s):  
AJung Moon ◽  
Shalaleh Rismani ◽  
H. F. Machiel Van der Loos

Abstract Purpose of Review To summarize the set of roboethics issues that uniquely arise due to the corporeality and physical interaction modalities afforded by robots, irrespective of the degree of artificial intelligence present in the system. Recent Findings One of the recent trends in the discussion of ethics of emerging technologies has been the treatment of roboethics issues as those of “embodied AI,” a subset of AI ethics. In contrast to AI, however, robots leverage human’s natural tendency to be influenced by our physical environment. Recent work in human-robot interaction highlights the impact a robot’s presence, capacity to touch, and move in our physical environment has on people, and helping to articulate the ethical issues particular to the design of interactive robotic systems. Summary The corporeality of interactive robots poses unique sets of ethical challenges. These issues should be considered in the design irrespective of and in addition to the ethics of artificial intelligence implemented in them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5445
Author(s):  
Muyun Sun ◽  
Jigan Wang ◽  
Ting Wen

Creativity is the key to obtaining and maintaining competitiveness of modern organizations, and it has attracted much attention from academic circles and management practices. Shared leadership is believed to effectively influence team output. However, research on the impact of individual creativity is still in its infancy. This study adopts the qualitative comparative analysis method, taking 1584 individuals as the research objects, underpinned by a questionnaire-based survey. It investigates the influence of the team’s shared leadership network elements and organizational environmental factors on the individual creativity. We have found that there are six combination of conditions of shared leadership and organizational environmental factors constituting sufficient combination of conditions to increase or decrease individual creativity. Moreover, we have noticed that the low network density of shared leadership is a sufficient and necessary condition of reducing individual creativity. Our results also provide management suggestions for practical activities during the team management.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002199832199945
Author(s):  
Jong H Eun ◽  
Bo K Choi ◽  
Sun M Sung ◽  
Min S Kim ◽  
Joon S Lee

In this study, carbon/epoxy composites were manufactured by coating with a polyamide at different weight percentages (5 wt.%, 10 wt.%, 15 wt.%, and 20 wt.%) to improve their impact resistance and fracture toughness. The chemical reaction between the polyamide and epoxy resin were examined by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The mechanical properties and fracture toughness of the carbon/epoxy composites were analyzed. The mechanical properties of the carbon/epoxy composites, such as transverse flexural tests, longitudinal flexural tests, and impact tests, were investigated. After the impact tests, an ultrasonic C-scan was performed to reveal the internal damage area. The interlaminar fracture toughness of the carbon/epoxy composites was measured using a mode I test. The critical energy release rates were increased by 77% compared to the virgin carbon/epoxy composites. The surface morphology of the fractured surface was observed. The toughening mechanism of the carbon/epoxy composites was suggested based on the confirmed experimental data.


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