LAUSR

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.