Augmented Virtual Stiffness Rendering of a Cable-driven SEA for Human-Robot Interaction

Human-robot interaction(HRI) is fundamental for human-centered robotics, and has been attracting intensive research for more than a decade. The series elastic actuator(SEA) provides inherent compliance, safety and further benefits for HRI, but the introduced elastic element also brings control difficulties. In this paper, we address the stiffness rendering problem for a cable-driven SEA system, to achieve either low stiffness for good transparency or high stiffness bigger than the physical spring constant, and to assess the rendering accuracy with quantified metrics. By taking a velocity-sourced model of the motor, a cascaded velocity-torque-impedance control structure is established. To achieve high fidelity torque control, the 2-DOF(degree of freedom) stabilizing control method together with a compensator has been used to handle the competing requirements on tracking performance, noise and disturbance rejection,and energy optimization in the cable-driven SEA system. The conventional passivity requirement for HRI usually leads to a conservative design of the impedance controller, and the rendered stiffness cannot go higher than the physical spring constant. By adding a phase-lead compensator into the impedance controller,the stiffness rendering capability was augmented with guaranteed relaxed passivity. Extensive simulations and experiments have been performed, and the virtual stiffness has been rendered in the extended range of 0.1 to 2.0 times of the physical spring constant with guaranteed relaxed passivity for physical humanrobot interaction below 5 Hz. Quantified metrics also verified good rendering accuracy.

Active vibration control of a large space telescope truss based on unilateral saturated cable actuators

Due to obvious advantages,such as light weight,easy folding and deployment and high accuracy of optical imaging,the membrane diffraction large space telescope has currently been one of the hot research topics.Because of the influence of external disturbance and attitude adjustment,the large space telescope will occur a certain degree of vibration inevitably,affecting the imaging accuracy of the space telescope for Earth.Thus,to satisfy the requirement of imaging accuracy,it is necessary for the space telescope to adopt appropriate vibration control methods.In this paper,the active vibration control of the large space telescope is studied using cables as active actuators.Considering that cables can work under tension but not under pression and the tensile capacity is limited,the unilateral and saturated characteristics of cable actuators are taken into account during control design in this paper.Firstly,the dynamic model of the membrane diffraction space telescope is established using the finite element method(FEM).Secondly,in combination with the linear quadratic regulator(LQR)and the bang-bang regulator,a piecewise cost function is used to design the active vibration control law.Next,the controllability criterion and the genetic algorithm(GA)are adopted to determine the optimal positions of cable actuators.Finally,the validity of the proposed control method is verified by numerical simulations.Simulation results indicate that the vibration of the space telescope can be suppressed effectively using the proposed control method,and the imaging requirements of the telescope may be realized using the least cable actuators,whose minimum quantity and position distribution are determined in this paper.