Design and Preliminary Testing of a Magnetic Spring as an Energy-Storing System for Reduced Power Consumption of a Humanoid Arm

The increasing use of robots in the industry, the growing energy prices, and higher environmental awareness have driven research to find new solutions for reducing energy consumption. In additional, in most robotic tasks, energy is used to overcome the forces of gravity, but in a few industrial applications, the force of gravity is used as a source of energy. For this reason, the use of magnetic springs with actuators may reduce the energy consumption of robots performing trajectories due their high-hardness magnetic properties of energy storage. Accordingly, this paper proposes a magnetic spring configuration as an energy-storing system for a two DoF humanoid arm. Thus, an integration of the magnetic spring system in the robot is described. A control strategy is proposed to enable autonomous use. In this paper, the proposed device is modeled and analyzed with simulations as: mechanical energy consumption and kinetic energy rotational and multibody dynamics. Furthermore, a prototype was manufactured and validated experimentally. A preliminary test to check the interaction between the magnetic spring system with the mechanism and the trajectory performance was carried out. Finally, an energy consumption comparison with and without the magnetic spring is also presented.

Robotic Humanoid Arm

The study aims for the development of a robotic humanoid arm for prosthesis, developed at the level of a prototype, with the help of which the user can replace a lost or missing limb. The movement of the fingers is done through servomotors and the control for the prototype is obtained by using a mobile application, this control method is used strictly for testing. The present project has a custom control board that is made from a Arduino Nano development board, Bluetooth HC-05 module, power/servo pins and provides a viable technical interfacing solution for testing the above mentioned equipment, using the Arduino Nano resources and the IDE/Java software resources.

Comparison of Proportional, Integral and Derivative and Adaptive Controller for Pitch and Roll Motion of Humanoid Arm

A Comparison of Proportional, Integral and Derivative and Lypunov based Model Reference Adaptive Controller for Roll and Pitch Movement of Humanoid Arm in presence of perturbations is proposed in this paper. This controller ensures the dynamic stability of humanoid arm motions even with the external disturbances. The Performance of controllers is evaluated based on the criterion: Integral Squared Error, Integral Absolute Error and Integral Time-weighted Absolute Error. It is observed that the system is able to track the inputs even in presence of disturbance without any overshoot using Adaptive Controller.

Joint Position Control Based on Fractional-Order PD and PI Controllers for the Arm of the Humanoid Robot TEO

This paper presents a control scheme for the humanoid robot TEO’s elbow joint based on a novel tuning method for fractional-order PD and PI controllers. Due to the graphical nature of the proposed method, a few basic operations are enough to tune the controllers, offering very competitive results compared to classic methods. The experiments show a robust performance of the system to mass changes at the tip of the humanoid arm.