Compliant design for intrinsic safety: general issues and preliminary design

In this paper, we describe some initial results of a project aiming at development of a programmablecompliance, inherently safe robot arm for applications in anthropic environmnets. In order to obtain safety in spite of worst-case situations (such as unexpected delays in teleoperation, or even controller failure), we will consider achieving compliance by mechanical rather than by control design. We rst describe some of the control problems that the presence of large, possibly unknown mechanical compliance typically introduces, and present a result that shows the possibility to cope with these uncertainties in an adaptive way. In the second part of the paper we describe the initial development of a new prototype arm under construction in our laboratory. The arm is designed to achieve arbitrary position tracking in 3D with controlled e ective compliance at the joints.