Development of Joint Actuators for Human-Friendly Manipulators with Low Inertia and Easy Assembly

Manipulators are versatile and are expected to be widely used. Safe and convenient manipulators are needed to facilitate close interaction with humans and to be utilized in people's daily lives. This paper proposes a new joint actuator configuration as a way to simultaneously solve human-friendly manipulator design elements such as small size, light weight, low moment of inertia, high back-drivability, reduced number of parts, and ease of disassembly and assembly. By dividing the stator and rotor into separate links instead of treating them as a single motor, we aimed to realize a compact mechanism and reduce the moment of inertia, as well as to make the links easily separable and connectable for convenient transportation and recombination.