Modeling and control of the CCEA robotic arm

It is crucial to have safely physical interaction between people and machines in versatile situations. In this paper, a new and efficient actuation robotic arm, continuous-state coupled elastic actuation (CCEA), is proposed to provide human-machine systems with an intrinsically programmable stiffness capacity to shape output force corresponding to the deviation between human motions and set positions of the system. The bond graph approach is used to analyze the variable stiffness property of the CCEA system, and the backstepping controller based on bond graph is employed to control the robotic arm. Finally, some experiments about controlling the CCEA robotic arm has been conducted and shown satisfactory results.