Mechanical design and energy storage efficiency research of a variable stiffness elastic actuator

Stiffness Control of Variable Serial Elastic Actuators: Energy Efficiency through Exploitation of Natural Dynamics

Variable elastic actuators are very promising for applications in physical human–robot interaction. Besides enabling human safety, such actuators can support energy efficiency, especially if the natural behavior of the system is exploited. In this paper, the power and energy consumption of variable stiffness actuators with serial elasticity is investigated analytically and experimentally. Besid...

A Stiffness Estimator for Agonistic-Antagonistic Variable-Stiffness-Actuator Devices

Safe Physical Human Robot Interaction, conservation of energy and adaptability are just the main robotic applications that prompted the development of a number of Variable Stiffness Actuators (VSA). Implemented in a variety of ways, they use various technologies, and feature the most diverse mechanical solutions, all of which share a fundamentally unavoidable nonlinear behavior. The control sch...

Mechanical efficiency and efficiency of storage and release of series elastic energy in skeletal muscle during stretch-shorten cycles.

The mechanical energy exchanges between components of a muscle-tendon complex, i.e. the contractile element (CE) and the series elastic element (SEE), and the environment during stretch-shorten cycles were examined. The efficiency of the storage and release of series elastic energy (SEE efficiency) and the overall mechanical efficiency of the rat gastrocnemius muscle (N = 5) were determined for...

Mechanical Influences on the Design of Actuators with Variable Stiffness

In the 1990s compliant joint actuation was introduced to robotics with the Series Elastic Actuator [1] and the Mechanical Impedance Adjuster [2]. Such concepts provide safer human-robot interaction, can store energy and decrease force control effort [1]. In the following decades, energy efficient actuation with such concepts had high impact in mobile applications such as bipedal robots, since t...

Energy Efficient Variable Stiffness Actuators: Conceptual Design and Implementation