Design and Optimization of Elastic Structure of Miniature Six-Dimensional Force/Torque Sensor

Six-dimensional force/torque sensors are capable of measuring force and torque information in three directions in the Cartesian coordinate system. As an important end-effector for robots, force and torque information can be obtained by force sensors to achieve precise operation and flexible control. Aiming at the problem that existing mechanical fingertips mostly use one-dimensional force sensors, this paper designs a miniature three-dimensional cross-beam type six-dimensional force sensor for measuring mechanical fingertip contact force and force-torque measurements, using the cross-beam and floating beam to jointly detect signals, which realizes the separation of force and torque measurements and reduces the gap between force and torque measurement accuracy. The sensitivity and stiffness performance of the elastic structure are analyzed by finite element simulation, and the mesh-independent analysis ensures the relative accuracy of the simulation data. According to the results of the analysis, three main factors affecting the performance of the elastic structure were selected for response surface optimization, the DOE data were fitted with the least squares method and the MGPA algorithm was used to find the optimal results as follows: compared with the original model, the total deformation of the optimized elastic structure was improved by 6.8%, and the natural frequency was decreased by 0.61% only, which proved that this optimization scheme was effective.