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Robust Position Control Of A Novel Series Elastic Actuator Via Disturbance Observer, Emre Sariyildiz, Gong Chen, Haoyong Yu

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

This paper proposes a new robust position control method for a novel series elastic actuator (SEA). It is a wellknown fact that SEAs provide many benefits in force control, e.g., lower reflected inertia and impedance, greater shock tolerance, safety, and so on. However, current SEA designs have a common performance limitation due to the compromise on the selection of spring stiffness. The performance of an SEA can be significantly improved by changing the stiffness of the spring; however, designing a variable-stiffness SEA is a quite challenging task. In this paper, a novel variable-stiffness SEA, which can relax the fundamental performance …