In this study, we developed an FSEA(Force-sensing Series Elastic Actuator) composed of a spring and an actuator has been developed to compensate for external disturbance forced. The FSEA has a simple structure in which the spring and the actuator are connected in series, and the external force can be easily measured through the displacement of the spring. And the characteristic of the spring absorbs the shock to the small disturbance and increases the sense of stability. It is designed and constructed to control the stiffness of such springs more flexibly according to the situation. The conventional FSEA uses a fixed stiffness spring and the actuator is not compensated properly when it receives large or small external force. Through this experiment, it is confirmed that FSEA compensates the external force through the proposed algorithm that the variable stiffness compensates well for large and small external forces.

This paper deals with the development and application of control algorithms for series elastic relief robots for rescue operations in harsh environment like disasters or battlefield. The joint controller applied in this paper has a cascade structure combining inner loop for torque control and outer loop for position control. The torque loop contains feedforward and feedback controller and disturbance observer for independent, decentralized joint control. The effect of the elastic component and motor dynamics are treated as the nonlinear disturbance and compensated with the disturbance observer of torque controller. For the collision detection, Band Designed Disturbance Observer is configured to recognize/respond to external disturbance robustly in the continuously changing environment. The controller is applied to a 7-dof series elastic manipulator to evaluate the torque tracking and collision detection/response performance.