Evaluation Method for Multidegree-of-Freedom Spherical Actuators Under Power Control

Abstract

Multidegree-of-freedom (multi-DOF) actuators have been developed for the fields of robotics and industrial machinery. In general, an actuating system with multi-DOF is composed of single-DOF actuators, which results in large, heavy, and complicated structures. Therefore, multi-DOF actuators are expected to become a key technology to solve these problems, and various actuators have been proposed and evaluated using their own methods. However, evaluation methods for absolute comparisons of the actuators have not been proposed. In order to evaluate the characteristics of the spherical synchronous actuators under the same condition, an evaluation method based on a torque equation and singular value decomposition is proposed. The proposed method can evaluate the static torque characteristics using a torque area that is composed of torques around arbitrary axes. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing the static torque characteristics of several spherical actuators.