Novel Adaptive Magnetic Springs for Reliable Industrial Variable Stiffness Actuation

Abstract

Parallel elastic actuation is a highly promising concept for assisting preplanned trajectories such as repetitive tasks in industrial machines and robots. Nevertheless, due to the persisting challenges on spring lifetime, its full potential has yet to be leveraged in the industry. We propose a novel adaptive magnetic spring as a fatigue-free spring mechanism to enable variable stiffness actuators in long lifetime applications. The spring is designed to flexibly deal with variations in operating conditions, i.e., mass customization. We propose a co-design methodology which simultaneously optimizes the sizing of the magnetic spring (for the given machine and its operating conditions), together with the controls and ideal dynamic response of the system. This mechanism and the methodology are applied to a design problem of a weaving machine drivetrain, where the benefits of the adaptive magnetic spring are highlighted with respect to a fixed stiffness magnetic spring, and the current industrial benchmark without springs. Experimentally validated findings show a consistent and considerable improvement with respect to energy consumption and peak torque reduction of up to 47% and 64%, respectively, when comparing to the current industrial benchmark.