Experimental Determination Of Torque Control Capability Of A Modular Robot Actuator: An Undergraduate Research Project

The goal of this manuscript is to present the undergraduate research experience of the first author as a mentee in Graduates Linked with Undergraduates in Engineering (GLUE) initiative at the Cockrell School of Engineering in The University of Texas at Austin. GLUE is a retention and career development program developed and managed by the Women in Engineering Program (WEP) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). GLUE is designed to address undergraduate attrition and low rates of perseverance to graduate school. This mentoring program partners a senior graduate student with an undergraduate mentee to work on an engineering research project within the major of both the mentor and the mentee. The GLUE program will be five years old in Spring 2009. This undergraduate research experience involved a project in the field of robotics. Safety in human-robot interaction is an issue that has received much attention in the literature recently. To make robot manipulators safe around humans, it is important to be able to control them in torque mode in addition to velocity control capability. The undergraduate research project presented in this paper focused on determining the motor current to output torque relationship for a commercial robot actuator, which in turn enables torque-based dynamic control. The mentee participated in an experimental project to determine the torque characteristics of a commercially available modular robot actuator. The outcome of this effort was a set of experimental data (torque to current mapping for the actuator) which then facilitates torque-based dynamic control of the modular manipulator assembled from these actuators.