Shape of Contact Parts Suitable for Measument of Contact Force Distribution for Safety Assist

Abstract

To improve safety of wearable assist robots, this paper investigates the influences of shape of contact parts of the robots applying force to users. Because the robots contact the users and apply the force directly, improving safety for the user is the most important task. To improve safety from the aspect of control system, a contact force distribution feedback control system has been researched. Performance of the control system is closely related to measurement of contact force. To improve the measurement performance, contact parts designed to be similar to the human body surface was proposed. In the previous research, the effectiveness of the proposed parts was only confirmed through computer simulation. In this paper, we built on a robot and evaluated measurement performance. Compared to simple-shaped parts, the proposed parts was confirmed to be more suitable measurement result for the control system.