Co-design of Environmental Compliance for High-speed Contact Tasks

The design of physical compliance – its location, de-
gree, and structure – involves tradeoffs in collision performance,
proprioceptive capabilities, and motion control performance.
While compliance can be introduced in the robot (in the joints,
flange, end-effector/gripper), most manipulation tasks are done in
human-built environments, and compliance can also be integrated
into the environment. This paper presents three prototypes
for environment compliance, using additive manufacturing to
integrate flexures and viscoelastic materials. Two remote center
of compliance (RCC) devices and a 1-DOF linear device are
prototyped and tested in high-speed assembly tasks