Design of V2SOM: The Safety Mechanism for Cobot’s Rotary Joints

The recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift from making stiff robots towards making compliant ones. The latter brings several benefits such as enhancing force control in physical interaction scenario of robots with unknown environments, among others. Indeed, collaborative robots, known as cobots, stands as one of the main applications of this new paradigm. Herein, safety aspect is considered by presenting the new Variable Stiffness Safety Oriented Mechanism (V2SOM) [1]. As its name indicates, V2SOM aims at making physical Human Robot Interaction (pHRI) safe, thanks to its two basic functioning modes, i.e. high stiffness mode and low stiffness mode. The first mode for normal operational routines. In contrast, low stiffness mode is suited for safe absorption of any potential blunt shock between a human subject and the cobot in place. The transition between the two modes is continuous to maintain a good control of the V2SOM-based cobot in case of fast collision.