Design and development of a torsion-based series elastic actuator with nested encoders for a wearable exoskeleton robot

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a high torque-to-mass ratio series elastic actuator (SEA) for wearable powered exoskeletons. Nonbackdrivable actuators are ideal for applications that require high torque. Commonly, active exoskeleton robots are powered by actuators that are nonbackdrivable. Due to the high gear ratio, the output mechanical impedance of these actuators is quiet high which renders their force/torque control challenging. To provide torque controllability a custom torsional spring has been produced and placed at the output side of the series elastic actuator. In addition, the measurement of the angular displacement of this elastic element is challenging in terms of mechanical design. To prevent this design challenge a double shaft mechanism was proposed. In this mechanism, the first shaft, which connects the spring and the spring encoder, goes through the second shaft, which is connected to the motor and the motor encoder. This way both encoders are placed on a the same side of the SEA. In addition to explaining this compact spring shaft mechanism, this article presents the results of the cascaded PID controller with a disturbance observer (DoB) applied on the actuator.