Energy Implications of Torque Feedback Control and Series Elastic Actuators for Mobile Robots

Torque feedback control and series elastic actuators are widely used to enable compact, highly-geared electric motors to provide low and controllable mechanical impedance. While these approaches provide certain benefits for control, their impact on system energy consumption is not widely understood. This paper presents a model for examining the energy consumption of drivetrains implementing various target dynamic behaviors in the presence of gear reductions and torque feedback. Analysis of this model reveals that under cyclical motions for many conditions, increasing the gear ratio results in greater energy loss. A similar model is presented for series elastic actuators and used to determine the energy consequences of various spring stiffness values. Both models enable the computation and optimization of power based on specific hardware manifestations, and illustrate how energy consumption sometimes defies conventional best-practices. Results of evaluating these two topologies as part of a drivetrain design optimization for two energy-efficient electrically driven humanoids are summarized. The model presented enables robot designers to predict the energy consequences of gearing and series elasticity for future robot designs, helping to avoid substantial energy sinks that may be inadvertently introduced if these issues are not properly analyzed.