Development and Simulation of the Series Elastic Actuator for Force Sensing

A series elastic actuator (SEA) is state-of-the-art actuation technology to achieve high fidelity force control applications. Most of force control applications need to deliver forces with a high level of safety and accuracy. SEA offers many advantages for these applications and various designs have been developed. The most obvious advantage of SEA is that it can calculate an external force using spring. Also, SEA is easy to control for the compensation of an external force. When the load end of the SEA is impacted, the SEA measures the displacement of the spring. And then by using Hook's law, an external force generating from the environment can be inferred. also, if appropriate output force corresponding to the measured external force is able to be generated, SEA can be used as a high-performance active suspension at a low cost. Therefore, this paper discusses design and control of SEA for calculating the external force. The SEA designed by using a linear spring is introduced and then the simulation is conducted using MATLAB Simulink for efficiency analysis.