We would like to find out, how well we can use our lightweight arms to measure torques and forces.
We are interested in:
sensitivity (what is the smallest force that we can detect)
noise (variance, peak-to-peak)
accuracy (how much can we trust the measurements)
Of course, force reading depend on:
magnitude of the force
direction of the force
We suspect that the force / torque readings also depend on:
pose of the arm (manipulability ellipsoid)
stiffness of the arm
whether or not the hand is mounted or not
whether the arm is moving or not
We attach some weights to the end-effector and measure the torques that the arm is “seeing”.
For the experiments we record the following data:
joint angles of the arm (once)
manipulability ellipsoid (once, one matrix)
measured force & torque (log)
measured joint torques (log)
direction of the force (once)