Design, modelling and control of a light touch mechanism

Extensive researches have demonstrated that a light touch with the fingertip has a significant stabilizing effect on postural sway during stance. However there are rare researches on evaluation of the effect of the light touch when people are walking. To conduct this type of work, a light touch robot that can follow people and can maintain a constant force contact is needed. This paper proposes a novel light touch mechanism to conduct the task. The kinematics and dynamics analyses of the mechanism are provided. A simple computed torque based control approach is developed to simulate and validate the proposed mechanism. The simulation results show the contacting force can be well controlled around a constant value.