This paper introduces the KUKA Robot Learning Lab at KIT -a remotely accessible robotics testbed. The motivation behind the laboratory is to make state-of-the-art industrial lightweight robots more accessible for education and research. Such expensive hardware is usually not available to students or less privileged researchers to conduct experiments. This paper describes the design and operation of the Robot Learning Lab and discusses the challenges that one faces when making experimental robot cells remotely accessible. Especially safety and security must be ensured, while giving users as much freedom as possible when developing programs to control the robots. A fully automated and efficient processing pipeline for experiments makes the lab suitable for a large amount of users and allows a high usage rate of the robots.
We introduce a six-actuator robotic joint mechanism with biarticular coupling inspired by the human limb which neither requires pneumatic artificial muscles nor tendon coupling. The actuator can independently change monoarticular and biarticular stiffness as well as both joint positions. We model and analyse the actuator with respect to stiffness variability in comparison with an actuator without biarticular coupling. We demonstrate that the biarticular coupling considerably extends the range of stiffness with an 70-fold improvement in versatility, in particular with respect to the end-point Cartesian stiffness shape and orientation. We suggest using Cartesian stiffness isotropy as an optimisation criterion for future underactuated versions.
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