Abstract
Design and control of mechanical compliance would be one of the most important technical foci in making humanoid robots really interactive with the humans. For task execution and safety insurance the issue must be discussed and offered useful and realistic solutions. In this paper, we propose a theoretical design principle of mechanical compliance. Passive compliance implies mechanically embedded one in drive systems and is reliable but not-tunable in nature, while active compliance is a controlled compliance and, therefore, widely tunable, but less reliable specially in high frequency domain. The basic idea of this paper is to use active compliance in the lower frequency domain and to rely on passive compliance in the higher frequency. H∞ control theory based on systems identification allows a systematic method to design the hybrid compliance in frequency domain. The proposed design is applied to the shoulder mechanism of a humanoid robot. Its implementation and experiments are to be shown with successful results.
