Strain Gauge Neural Network-Based Estimation as an Alternative for Force and Torque Sensor Measurements in Robot Manipulators

Abstract

When a robotic manipulator interacts with its environment, the end-effector forces need to be measured to assess if a task has been completed successfully and for safety reasons. Traditionally, these forces are either measured directly by a 6-dimensional (6D) force–torque sensor (mounted on a robot’s wrist) or by estimation methods based on observers, which require knowledge of the robot’s exact model. Contrary to this, the proposed approach is based on using an array of low-cost 1-dimensional (1D) strain gauge sensors mounted beneath the robot’s base in conjunction with time series neural networks, to estimate both the end-effector 3-dimensional (3D) interaction forces as well as robot joint torques. The method does not require knowledge of robot dynamics. For comparison reasons, the same approach was used but with 6D force sensor measurements mounted beneath the robot’s base. The trained networks showed reasonably good performance, using the long-short term memory (LSTM) architecture, with a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 1.945 N (vs. 2.004 N; 6D force–torque sensor-based) for end-effector force estimation and 3.006 Nm (vs. 3.043 Nm; 6D force–torque sensor-based) for robot joint torque estimation. The obtained results for an array of 1D strain gauges were comparable with those obtained with a robot’s built-in sensor, demonstrating the validity of the proposed approach.