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Peter Cuellar

Quasi-Direct Drive for Low-Cost Compliant Robotic Manipulation

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Apr 11, 2019
David V. Gealy, Stephen McKinley, Brent Yi, Philipp Wu, Phillip R. Downey, Greg Balke, Allan Zhao, Menglong Guo, Rachel Thomasson, Anthony Sinclair, Peter Cuellar, Zoe McCarthy, Pieter Abbeel

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Robots must cost less and be force-controlled to enable widespread, safe deployment in unconstrained human environments. We propose Quasi-Direct Drive actuation as a capable paradigm for robotic force-controlled manipulation in human environments at low-cost. Our prototype - Blue - is a human scale 7 Degree of Freedom arm with 2kg payload. Blue can cost less than $5000. We show that Blue has dynamic properties that meet or exceed the needs of human operators: the robot has a nominal position-control bandwidth of 7.5Hz and repeatability within 4mm. We demonstrate a Virtual Reality based interface that can be used as a method for telepresence and collecting robot training demonstrations. Manufacturability, scaling, and potential use-cases for the Blue system are also addressed. Videos and additional information can be found online at berkeleyopenarms.github.io

* This is our long version - 8 pages. Our 6 page version without a discussion of thermal limits was accepted to ICRA 2019. 11 Figures 
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