Design, actuation and control of an anthropomorphic robot arm

Current robots are not safe in interaction with humans, especially when children are involved. Therefore, a four degree-of-freedom robot arm is developed which is inherently safe. This is accomplished by giving the arm a compliant behavior at all times. Firstly, the joint stiffness of the arm is brought to zero. Secondly, the arm is supplied with pneumatic artificial muscles. Their stiffnesses can be adjusted by open loop stiffness control, thereby causing the arm to move to new equilibrium positions.