Spring design for motor torque reduction in articulated mechanisms

In this paper a procedure is developed to reduce the motor size in articulated mechanism. In particular, the paper presents a method that allows to reduce the peak torque requirement of a single degree of freedom mechanism, through the use of an elastic element. Unlike other works in literature, in this works the choice of the trajectory primitive and the resulting inertial effects are taken into account. Both numerical and experimental results show that the inclusion of a single spring can sensibly decrease the peak torque requirements, thus allowing a cost-effective motor size requirement.