Designs of Compliant Mechanism-Based Force Sensors: A Review

Sensing the interaction force in robot-assisted manipulation draws lots of attentions in related research fields. In order to protect the manipulation objects and to build the real-time force feedback for system control, force sensors have been proposed and applied. The sensing structures of most proposed force sensors possess the characteristics of compliant mechanisms. This paper reviews the designs of compliant mechanism-based force sensors in the past few years. Main sensing principles, scales and compliance, compliant mechanism designs of the force sensors have been studied and concluded. According to the researching status, the future developments of compliant mechanism-based force sensors have been also introduced. This paper aims at providing references of designing a high-performance compliant mechanism-based force sensor.