An Integrated Design Approach for a Series Elastic Actuator: Stiffness Formulation, Fatigue Analysis, Thermal Management

This paper presents an integrated mechanical design approach for the long-term and repetitive use of series elastic actuators (SEAs). Already, computational models for series elastic actuator design have been developed in order to address the challenging weight and volume targets. However, an integrated design method in which the coupling effects between various interacting requirements that are explored at every stage of the design cycle does not exist. In particular, the interactions between the torsional stiffness, strength, fatigue life and thermal performance are not analyzed in-depth. To this end, we propose a comprehensive design approach in which the aforementioned requirements (FEA, stiffness formulation, fatigue analysis, and thermal management) are integrated in a complementary manner. Computer-aided analyses and experimental results verified the effectiveness of our design approach. The proposed approach is employed to manufacture our SEA module CoEx-SEA.