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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?