Analysis and synthesis of series damper actuator

Abstract

The objective of this thesis was to develop a kind of force control actuator with high output force fidelity and low output impedance. A novel force/torque control actuator called Series Damper Actuator (SDA) was proposed. The proposed SDA system incorporated a series damper between the actuator and the load. The system was designed to effectively control the relative velocity in the damper to achieve the desired force given the damping coefficient. Magneto-Rheological (MR) fluid damper was proposed as the series damper to achieve variable damping coefficient. The full development process of SDA system has been intensively investigated including property analysis, controller design, plant design, and MR fluid damper design. The SDA system had been modeled, analyzed, designed, prototyped, and tested. Experimental results showed that the SDA system was successfully developed with good output force/torque fidelity, low output impedance, high impact tolerance ability and large force/torque range.