Home robot arms require a payload of 2 kg to perform various household tasks; at the same time, they should be operated by low-capacity motors and low-cost speed reducers to ensure reasonable product cost. Furthermore, as robot arms on mobile platforms are battery-driven, their energy efficiency should be very high. To satisfy these requirements, we designed a lightweight counterbalance mechanism (CBM) based on a spring and a wire and developed a home robot arm with five degrees of freedom (DOF) based on this CBM. The CBM compensates for gravitational torques applied to the two pitch joints that are most affected by the robot’s weight. The developed counterbalance robot adopts a belt-pulley based parallelogram mechanism for 2-DOF gravity compensation. Experiments using this robot demonstrate that the CBM allows the robot to meet the above-mentioned requirements, even with low-capacity motors and speed reducers.

Direct teaching is an essential function for collaborative robots for easy use by non-experts. For most robots, direct teaching is implemented only in joint space because the realization of Cartesian space direct teaching, in which the orientation of the end-effector is fixed while teaching, requires a measurement of the end-effector force. Thus, it is limited to the robots that are equipped with an expensive force/torque sensor. This study presents a Cartesian space direct teaching method for torque-controlled collaborative robots without either a force/torque sensor or joint torque sensors. The force exerted to the end-effector is obtained from the external torque which is estimated by the disturbance observer-based approach with the friction model. The friction model and the estimated end-effector force were experimentally verified using the robot equipped with joint torque sensors in order to compare the proposed sensorless approach with the method using torque sensors.

Static balance of an articulated robot arm at various configurations requires a torque compensating for the gravitational torque of each joint due to the robot mass. Such compensation torque can be provided by a spring-based counterbalance mechanism. However, simple installation of a counterbalance mechanism at each pitch joint does not work because the gravitational torque at each joint is dependent on other joints. In this paper, a 6 DOF industrial robot arm based on the parallelogram for multi-DOF counterbalancing is proposed to cope with this problem. Two passive counterbalance mechanisms are applied to pitch joints, which reduces the required torque at each joint by compensating the gravitational torque. The performance of this mechanism is evaluated experimentally.