Development of weight switching mechanical gravity canceller

In this paper, we propose a passive gravity compensation mechanism for carrying load with two springs and switching mechanism, which named "Weight Switching Mechanical Gravity Canceller (WS-MGC)." The WS-MGC has following advantages with the original MGC in load compensation. The original MGC required to determine the compensation weight from the beginning and to make actuator bear the load when end-effector has new luggage and carries it. In this case, it is effective to switching the compensation weight from the weight of the machine to the total weight of both machine and luggage, without power supply. WS-MGC can switch the compensation weight by the weight of luggage. From development and experiments of a link model equipped with WS-MGC, it is clarified that the versatile device is succeed to step up from weight compensation to load compensation.