Engineering
Designing Series Elastic Actuators for Safe Human-Robot Interaction
Quick fact
Series elastic actuators were introduced by Gill Pratt and Matthew Williamson in 1995 at MIT, and they dramatically improved a robot's ability to estimate and control forces: by measuring spring deflection, the actuator can accurately sense force without needing a separate force sensor.
Why this is interesting
When a robot arm accidentally bumps into you, why does it hurt less if it has a spring inside? And how can a spring actually help the robot control its force more precisely?