Instrumented Compliance for Tendon Driven Rotary Robot Joint

An important issue in the development of rotary joints is to provide the required compliance between the rigid links. The goal of this work presented in this paper is to present solutions to instrumented compliance for a tendon driven spherical robot joint. The solutions are based on a combination of active compliance, created by the actuator-controller subsystem, and piecewise linear passive compliance based on switching passive springs. Preliminary simulation and experimental results illustrate the performance for the case of a single DOF rotary joint