Design Validation and Collision Studies of A Compliant Magnetorheological Fluid Actuator

Robots are integrating into human society and become an important part. The robots and human must be considered as a whole system and the robots should be intelligent both in digital and physical like human to cooperate and interact with human non-physically or physically. For improving the physical intelligence of the robot, a magnetorheological fluid actuator (MRA) is proposed and studied in this paper. A collision model and a speed peak force planning method are proposed and some experiments are conducted. It shows that the collision peak force of the MRA with external objects can be easily controlled to different levels by controlling the compliance of the MRA for safe physical interaction with human or some striking works like hammering a nail.