Design of haptic master featuring small-sized MR brakes

Abstract

In this work, a new type of haptic master featuring small-sized MR brake is proposed and its performances are evaluated. The proposed haptic master consists of base frame, stick grip and small-sized four MR brakes for 3-DOF rotational motion and 1-DOF gripper motion. To obtain large braking torque under limited small size of MR brake, dual tapered shape inner magnetic core is proposed and its performance is evaluated via both numerical estimation and experimental test. After design and implementation of control algorithm, it has been demonstrated through experiment that the proposed actuator has good performances on tracking control of desired torques. Then, a new haptic master device is designed and constructed by adopting the proposed MR brakes and light weight frame structures. It is verified that the proposed haptic master device is effective for the real application in the field.