What range of robitic arms with pressure sensitive control exist

[monkeyfist2]

I am desiging a robitic arm with a pressure sensitive control. I am trying to compare my design ideas to others that exist but I have not been able to find any. If anyone knows of any good sites, or companies I should look at, then please say so.

 

[Barry1961]

I have used the values in the DAC, position and following error registers to weigh and measure the parts being handled. This was mostly to prevent double feeds when handling sheets and to measure cut parts for welding to adjust the weld path to the part. I have never designed a pressure sensing arm, just used the intrinsic pressure sensing to achive another goal. There are several pressure senors for the end of arm tooling but I think your talking about something else.

I don't know of any off the shelf robots that let you do this beyond a trip point function so you might have to go to some controller mfgs to get some info on your application. I used delta tau but there are several others that I think should have experience with pressure sensing. Gail, Sanyo Denki and Baldor should probably be able to help. I heard Baldor is doing some R&D in the states so you might be able to get some good info from them if you can get past the sales peeps.

Barry

 

[Boothby171]

Try

http://www.jr3.com

for multi-axis end-of-arm force & torque sensors. You can get analogue data out of them, as well as discrete set-point triggers. I've used them before, they work pretty good!

--Steve

 

[monkeyfist2]

Thats good stuff. I should prehaps go into more detail. The jr3 site seams good, but I am looking for inspiration on the design of the robot. I know the sensors I am going to use, which are similer to the FSRs on the jr3 site.

The robot will have an array of 19 sensors on each finger, and it will have three fingers, so 57 sensors in total. I am quite confident about the design of this part of the robot, and the control should be fine as well, but I am not sure what approach I should take to the mechanics of the machine. I was hoping to get a look at a few existing designs of small scale lifting robots to see what is alreddy on the market.

 

[Boothby171]

There is a "Hand Lab" at MIT, where they have researched a number of different hand configurations. NASA also did a lot of research in that area (I think that there is likely a strong relationship between the two...)

Do a Google search on "Robonaut", as it is using one of the 5-fingered highly dexterous hands I saw at the MIT lab.
You're packing an awful lot of sensors on each finger--that's a pretty heavy computational load!

There is a company called "Robotics Research" in Ohio.

Here's a picture of their arm:

http://www.me.umn.edu/courses/me5286/PastQuizzes/Quiz03.pdf

http://66.175.39.160/RRCTechDoc.PDF

Here's their website:

http://66.175.39.160/

They developed the original arms for the Robonaut project (back when I was working on it at Grumman, and it was the "Flight Telerobotic Servicer&quot

 

[Lucre]

Depending on exactly what you need to achieve you might try looking at Intelligent actuator. You can get a fairly inexpensive ballscrew actuator that you can use as force feed back system. They start at about ~$900.00

http://www.robocylinder.com/

Good Luck