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IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS, VOL. 19, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2014

Multi-DOF Counterbalance Mechanism

for a Service Robot Arm
Hwi-Su Kim and Jae-Bok Song, Member, IEEE

AbstractLow-cost but high-performance robot arms are required for widespread use of service robots. Most robot arms use
expensive motors and speed reducers to provide torques sufficient
to support the robot mass and payload. If the gravitational torques
due to the robot mass, which is usually much greater than the
payload, can be compensated for by some means; the robot would
need much smaller torques, which can be delivered by cheap actuator modules. To this end, we propose a novel counterbalance
mechanism which can completely counterbalance the gravitational
torques due to the robot mass. Since most 6-DOF robots have three
pitch joints, which are subject to gravitational torques, we propose
a 3-DOF counterbalance mechanism based on the double parallelogram mechanism, in which reference planes are provided to each
joint for proper counterbalancing. A 5-DOF counterbalance robot
arm was built to demonstrate the performance of the proposed
mechanism. Simulation and experimental results showed that the
proposed mechanism had effectively decreased the torque required
to support the robot mass, thus allowing the prospective use of lowcost motors and speed reducers for high-performance robot arms.
Index TermsCounterbalance mechanism, counterbalance
robot arm, low-cost robot, manipulator design.

I. INTRODUCTION
N recent years, service robot arms have received much attention because of their increasing use in various applications [1][3]. However, the robot arm market is still limited
because of the high prices of robot arms. Therefore, much research has been done to develop low-cost, high-performance
robot arms [4][8].
Most conventional robot arms are equipped with expensive
speed reducers and high-performance motors, which are used
to produce high torques that allow the arm to withstand the load
due to their own weight and motion. Cheap motors and speed
reducers do not provide sufficient torques to support the robot
arm mass and to accelerate it. Therefore, innovative strategies
are needed to reduce the required torque of robot arms in order
to achieve high performance even with cheap components. Note
that the word low cost in this paper means that the proposed

Manuscript received September 17, 2012; revised September 3, 2013;

accepted January 14, 2014. Date of publication March 17, 2014; date of current
version June 13, 2014. Recommended by Technical Editor Y. Li. This work was
supported in part by the Basic Science Research Program through NRF (20070056094), in part by the Development of Counterbalance Robots through the
MOTIE, and in part by a Korea University Grant.
The authors are with the School of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University,
Seoul 136-701, Korea (e-mail: fight704@korea.ac.kr; jbsong@korea.ac.kr).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMECH.2014.2308312

robot arm can achieve similar performance (e.g., payload) of

conventional robot arms more cheaply.
Several counterbalance mechanisms have been developed
to decrease the capacity of motors and speed reducers of
robot arms. In the case of industrial manipulators, a heavy
weight is often attached at the opposite side of the robot
arm to balance the gravitational torque due to the manipulator mass. However, external heavy mass increases the total mass of a robot arm, which results in the increases in the
torque required for acceleration and deceleration. To cope with
this problem, a multi-DOF counterbalance mechanism using
a pseudoparallelogram mechanism based on a belt and pulley
was suggested in [9], and a passive mechanical gravity compensator using pulleys and tension springs was developed in
[10]. These studies show that springs can be used to provide
a counterbalancing torque instead of a heavy external mass.
A cam-type counterbalance mechanism for industrial manipulators was designed in [11]. This study introduced the design
method of using a cam profile to generate a proper balancing
torque at the lower two joints of an articulated manipulator. A
counterbalance mechanism using differential bevel gears for a
2-DOF robot arm operating in a hemisphere workspace was proposed in [12]. This study shows that the counterbalance mechanism can be applied not only to the pitch joint, but also to the
roll joint of a robot arm. Some counterbalance mechanisms have
been widely used to design rehabilitation devices, since users
(i.e., patients) do not have enough strength to operate rehabilitation devices. For example, a 2-DOF counterbalance mechanism
using gears, pulleys, and wires for lower limb rehabilitation was
developed in [13].
However, the previous counterbalance mechanisms are limited to only one or two joints of a multi-DOF robot arm. Moreover, robots using these mechanisms are too heavy and bulky
to be used for service robot arms, and their operational ranges
are usually restricted due to the counterbalance mechanism. In
this study, we develop a novel counterbalance mechanism using
springs and wires. This mechanism can effectively compensate
for the gravitational torques required at each joint to support the
robot arm mass for any robot configurations. In other words, the
motors and speed reducers have only to provide the torque to
move the payload and the robot without supporting all the gravitational loads, which are automatically compensated for by the
counterbalance mechanism. Thus, low-power actuator modules
are sufficient to achieve high performance, significantly reducing the cost related to the actuators.
The proposed mechanism is applicable to all joints of the
robot arm because it uses a double parallelogram mechanism.
A 5-DOF robot arm using the proposed mechanism was built to

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KIM AND SONG: MULTI-DOF COUNTERBALANCE MECHANISM FOR A SERVICE ROBOT ARM

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Fig. 2. Gravitational torque of 1-DOF arm: (a) simplified model and (b) torque
as a function of .

Fig. 1. Simulations of the torques required to operate a typical 6-DOF robot

arm: (a) simulation model and condition, (b) torques required to operate joint
2, and (c) joint 3 with a payload of 02 kg between 0 and 90%, at 90 /s.

demonstrate the performance of the proposed mechanism. Since

the gravitational torque due to the robot mass was effectively
compensated for by the counterbalance mechanism, expensive
motors and speed reducers were no longer required.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The multiDOF counterbalance mechanism using springs and wires, and
the double parallelogram mechanism is discussed in Section II.
Section III shows the design of the counterbalance robot arm
using the suggested counterbalance mechanism. In Section IV,
various simulation and experimental results are presented to
effectively illustrate the performances of the designed counterbalance mechanism and the counterbalance robot arm. Finally,
the conclusion is presented in Section V.
II. COUNTERBALANCE MECHANISM
In this section, a novel counterbalance mechanism using
springs and wires is presented as well as its application to a
multi-DOF robot arm.

where m and l are the mass and length of the link, respectively,
lc is the distance from the joint axis to the link center of mass,
and is the angular displacement of the link from the y-axis.
Also, for this simple robot, the counterbalance mechanism can
be easily designed by installing a spring with a proper stiffness
k between the reference plane (base) and the link to generate
a counterbalancing torque that cancels the gravitational torque
due to the link mass.
Next, let us consider a 2-DOF robot shown in Fig. 3(a). During
the rotation of a robot arm, the gravitational torque at each joint
can be given by
Tg 1 (1 , 2 ) = m1 glc1 sin 1 + m2 g {l1 sin 1 + lc2 sin( 1 + 2 )}
= (m1 glc1 + m2 gl1 ) sin 1 + m2 glc2 sin( 1 + 2 )
Tg 2 (1 , 2 ) = m2 glc2 sin( 1 + 2 ).

A. Gravitational Torque Due to the Robot Mass

The highest torques required for the motion of robot arms
are gravitational torques and inertial torques. The Coriolis and
centrifugal effects are not great unless the robot moves at high
speeds. The inertial torque, which accelerates or decelerates the
robot, is usually small, provided that the robot moves at reasonable speeds and accelerations. A gravitational torque occurs due
to the masses of the robot and payload, but most of the gravitational torque is caused by the robot mass, which is much greater
than the payload mass for most robots. This phenomenon can be
seen in Fig. 1, in which the results of a simulation show the relatively small dependence of the required torque on the payload
mass. It is therefore clear that counterbalancing the gravitational
torque due to the robot mass can minimize the torque required
at each joint.
The gravitational torque Tg of a simple 1-DOF robot shown
in Fig. 2(a) is given by
Tg = mglc sin

Fig. 3. Gravitational torque of 2-DOF arm: (a) simplified model and (b) torque
as a function of 1 with 2 = 0.

(1)

(2)

The gravitational torques at joints 1 and 2 are affected by

both joint angles 1 and 2 . For example, Tg 2 is affected by 1 ,
which is the absolute angle from the base frame and 2 , which
is the relative angle from link 1. Therefore, the counterbalance
mechanism at joint 2 should be designed to generate a torque
that cancels the gravitational torque due to both the absolute
angle and relative angle.
Thus, the counterbalance mechanism for a multi-DOF robot
cannot be designed by merely placing a spring at each joint.
Let us consider a 2-DOF robot with a spring between each link
and the reference plane to generate the counterbalancing torque,
as shown in Fig. 4. This counterbalance mechanism, however,
cannot generate the proper counterbalancing torque in several
robot configurations.
Suppose that link 2 rotates while link 1 remains stationary
as shown in Fig. 4(b). Since the reference plane for link 2 is
fixed in space due to the fact that link 1 is stationary, spring 2

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IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS, VOL. 19, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2014

Fig. 6. Parallelogram mechanism constructed of: (a) 4-bar linkage, and

(b) pulley and wire.
Fig. 4. 2-DOF counterbalance mechanism in various configurations: (a) initial
configuration, (b) only joint 2 is rotated by , and (c) only joint 1 is rotated by
.

Fig. 7.
Fig. 5. 1-DOF counterbalance mechanism: (a) concept model and (b) closeup
view of triangle in general position.

can compensate for the gravitational torque at joint 2. However,

the motion of link 2 induces a gravitational torque at joint 1,
which cannot be compensated for by spring 1 because link 1 is
stationary. Therefore, the counterbalance mechanism should be
designed such that it can deliver a proper spring force to each
joint in any configuration.
As another example, suppose that links 1 and 2 rotate together
by the same angle. The reference plane for link 2, which is
attached to link 1, also rotates with link 1. Therefore, spring 2
cannot generate the counterbalance torque required for joint 2
in Fig. 4(c) while it can do so in Fig. 4(b), although the identical
gravitational torque is applied to joint 2 in both configurations.
Therefore, every link should have its own fixed reference plane
for counterbalance, and this plane should be invariant to the
movement of other joints.
B. Single-DOF Counterbalance Mechanism
The concept model of the proposed counterbalance mechanism is shown in Fig. 5. To compensate for the gravitational
torque of the robot, a compression spring (instead of the tension
spring shown in Fig. 2) and a wire were used in the counterbalance mechanism. When the link is rotated, the spring is
compressed by the spring block pulled by the wire. The spring
force can be given by
Fs () = k {so + c() (b a)}

(3)

where k is the spring stiffness, so is the initial compression

length of the spring, and , a, b, and c() are defined in Fig. 5.
From the equation of the closure of the mechanism shown in
Fig. 5(b), the counterbalancing torque Tc can be given by
Tc () = bFs () sin

(4)

3-DOF counterbalance mechanism with reference plane at each joint.

where c = (a2 + b2 2ab cos )1/2 and sin = a sin/c. Finally,

the difference torque, which is calculated as the difference between the gravitational and counterbalancing torques, required
to maintain the posture of the robot can be computed by
Td () = Tg () Tc ().

(5)

The counterbalancing torque Tc cancels the gravitational

torque Tg in ideal conditions so that the difference torque Td
becomes 0. From (1) and (4), the relationship among the length
lc , a, b, and the spring constant k can be described by
mglc sin = bk {so + c() (b a)}

a sin
.
c()

(6)

Therefore, if the initial compression length of the spring so is

set to b a, the spring to generate the proper counterbalancing
torque can be easily selected by the relationship k = mglc /ab.
C. Double Parallelogram Mechanism
A 4-bar linkage system is often used to construct a parallelogram mechanism, in which the driven link is maintained in
the same direction, as shown in Fig. 6(a). These links can be
replaced by wires and pulleys, as shown in Fig. 6(b). With the
parallelogram mechanism, the reference plane, which is fixed
on pulley 2, maintains a constant absolute angle (i.e., usually
parallel to the direction of gravity). Therefore, a counterbalancing torque can be generated at joint 2 with respect to reference
plane 2. Note that the wire is not used to rotate the link, but just
to connect pulley 2 to the fixed pulley 1 to generate reference
plane 2.
We adopted a double parallelogram mechanism based on pulleys and wires to provide counterbalancing torques to the multiple pitch joints of a service robot arm (i.e., three pitch joints
for most industrial robots). The reference plane with a constant
absolute angle can be generated at each joint, and a spring is
installed between each reference plane and the corresponding
link to generate the counterbalancing torque. Fig. 7 shows that

KIM AND SONG: MULTI-DOF COUNTERBALANCE MECHANISM FOR A SERVICE ROBOT ARM

Fig. 11.

Fig. 8. 3-DOF counterbalance mechanism for: (a) lower 2 joints, (b) wrist
joint, and (c) closeup view of triangle in general position.

Fig. 9.

Orientation of link 3 in various configurations.

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Design of the counterbalance robot arm.

where cj = (a2j + b2j 2aj bj cosj )1/2 , and sinj = aj sinj /cj
for joints 1 and 3. In the case of the counterbalance mechanism
of joint 2, c2 = {a22 + b22 2a2 b2 b2 cos(1 +2 )}1/2 since the
absolute angle is affected by the angle of joint 1.
In serial robot arms, the gravitational torque of joint j (j =
1, . . . , n) is the sum of the gravitational torques of joint j to
joint n. For example, in the case of the 2-DOF arm shown
in Fig. 3, the gravitational torque of joint 1 consists of the
two terms (m1 glc1 + m2 gl1 )sin1 and m2 glc2 sin(1 + 2 ) in
(2), which are the gravitational torques due to links 1 and 2,
respectively. Note that the second term is compensated for by
the counterbalance mechanism installed at joint 2, and thus, the
counterbalance mechanism at joint 1 has only to cancel the first
term. In conclusion, each counterbalance mechanism has only
to cancel the gravitational torque due to its corresponding link
as shown in Fig. 10.
Therefore, the difference torque Td at each joint of the 3-DOF
robot arm can be calculated by
Td1 = Tg 1 (Tc 1 + Tc 2 + Tc 3 )
Td2 = Tg 2 (Tc 2 + Tc 3 )

Fig. 10.

Reference planes at each joint to generate counterbalancing torques.

the proper counterbalancing torque can be generated at each

joint when the robot arm moves from pose 1 to 4.
D. Multi-DOF Counterbalance Mechanism
Fig. 8 shows the counterbalance mechanism designed for
three continuous pitch joints: the lower two joints and the wrist
joint. As each link rotates, the installed springs are compressed
by the pulled wires as the distance between each fixed point and
idler changes.
The counterbalance mechanism installed at the wrist joint
shown in Fig. 8(b) and (c) generates a counterbalancing torque
for the gripper and grasped object. As shown in Fig. 9, the
orientation of link 3 is fixed relative to pulley 1, which is fixed
at the base frame. Therefore, link 3 can provide the reference
plane for the wrist joint.
The spring force Fsj and counterbalancing torque Tcj for the
counterbalance mechanism related to joint j can be given by
Fsj (1 , 2 , 3 ) = kj {soj + cj (bj aj )}

(7)

Tcj (1 , 2 , 3 ) = bj Fsj (j ) sin j

(8)

Td3 = Tg 3 Tc 3 .

(9)

III. COUNTERBALANCE ROBOT ARM

In this study, we constructed a 5-DOF robot arm using the
proposed counterbalance mechanisms to investigate the effectiveness of the mechanism. The required specifications of the
motors and speed reducers can be greatly decreased since the
gravitational torques due to the robot mass are compensated
for by the counterbalance mechanisms. Therefore, compared
to conventional robot arms, the counterbalance robot arm can
achieve the same performance (such as payload) using much
cheaper components. In this section, the design of the 5-DOF
counterbalance robot is presented.
A. Design of a 5-DOF Counterbalance Robot Arm
Among the three types of revolute joints (i.e., roll, pitch, and
yaw joints), pitch joints are affected by gravity. Therefore, we
installed the counterbalance mechanism at each pitch joint of
the robot. Fig. 11 shows the prototype design of the 5-DOF
counterbalance robot. This robot arm is constructed of yaw
pitchpitchpitch (passive joint)yawpitch joints. The passive

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TABLE I
SPECIFICATIONS OF THE ACTUATOR MODULE [14]

TABLE II
SPECIFICATIONS OF THE COUNTERBALANCE ROBOT ARM
Fig. 12.

Counterbalance mechanism for joint 2.

Fig. 13.

Prototype of the counterbalance robot arm.

pitch joint has no motor and speed reducer, and it is coupled with
joints 1 and 2 through the double parallelogram mechanism to
maintain a constant absolute angle. As shown in Fig. 11, the
counterbalance mechanism is not required for joints 1(yaw) and
4(yaw) since they always rotate parallel to the ground. Thus,
the proposed 3-DOF counterbalance mechanism needs to be
applied to only joints 2, 3, and 5.
Joint 2 is connected with the actuator module through a pinion
to provide an additional gear ratio of 1:1.9. To decrease the arm
mass, joint 3 is operated by the actuator module placed at the
base module of the robot via a tendon-driven mechanism with a
gear ratio of 1:1.9. Wires of the tendon drive and parallelogram
mechanism are placed inside hollow shafts. Most parts of the
counterbalance robot arm are constructed with the aluminum
alloy to achieve light weight.
The proposed counterbalance mechanism was designed so
that it can be embedded inside the robot arm. Since the counterbalance mechanisms at joints 2 and 3 should cancel the gravitational torques of the robot arm; the mass and the center of mass
of each link are optimized to obtain the best results. Several
springs were selected to provide the proper counterbalancing
torque and sufficient compressible length. Fig. 12 shows the
designed counterbalance mechanism for joint 2.
As shown in Fig. 12, the spring blocks are pulled by wires,
which are fixed at the reference planes, through the idlers when
each link is rotated in the CCW direction. Four bushes are installed inside the spring block to minimize the friction as the
spring block moves along the hollow shafts, as shown in the
section view A-A of the spring block. Wires for the parallelogram mechanism and tendon drive are passed through the hollow
shafts, and connected with the driven pulleys of the next joint.

TABLE III
DESIGN PARAMETERS FOR THE COUNTERBALANCE MECHANISM

robot arm are listed in Table I, and the specifications of the

robot arm are detailed in Table II. The module contains a motor,
gear reducer, controller, and communication device. Note that
these actuator modules alone cannot provide sufficient torques
for a 5-DOF robot arm. However, the proposed counterbalance
mechanism enabled the construction of a 5-DOF arm with a
reach of longer than 600 mm, a payload of 2 kg and an endpoint
speed greater than 2 m/s. Design parameters of the robot arm
and its counterbalance mechanism are presented in Fig. 13 and
Table III.
IV. SIMULATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS
The simulation results that verify the performance of the proposed counterbalance mechanism are presented in this section.
Sections IV-A and IV-B show the counterbalancing torque from
the counterbalance mechanisms during the operations of the
robot arm with and without the external load, respectively. Also,
the difference torque is presented for each result. Sections IV-C
and IV-D verify the performance of the counterbalance robot
arm by experiments.
A. Counterbalance Without an External Load

B. Prototype
The prototype of the counterbalance mechanism is presented
in Fig. 13. The low-cost actuator modules for the counterbalance

The simulation conditions of the counterbalance robot arm are

shown in Fig. 14. As mentioned in the previous section, a total
of three counterbalance mechanisms were installed, one at each

KIM AND SONG: MULTI-DOF COUNTERBALANCE MECHANISM FOR A SERVICE ROBOT ARM

Fig. 14.

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Simulation conditions of the counterbalance robot arm.

Fig. 16. Simulation results of gravitational, balancing, and difference torques

with an external load 2 kg at: (a) joint 2 with condition A, (b) joint 3 with
condition A, (c) joint 3 with condition B, and (d) joint 5 with condition C.

Fig. 15. Simulation results of gravitational, counterbalancing, and difference

torques without an external load at: (a) joint 2 with condition A, (b) joint 3 with
condition A, (c) joint 3 with condition B, and (d) joint 5 with condition C.

pitch joint (joint 2: shoulder joint, 3: elbow joint, and 5: wrist

joint) of the robot arm. In this simulation, it was assumed that
the robot was equipped with a 0.5-kg gripper at its end-effector.
The results in Fig. 15(a) and (b) show the gravitational, counterbalancing, and difference torques when joint 2 of the robot
arm was rotated from 0 to 180 in the CCW direction without
an external load. On the other hand, Fig. 15(c) and (d) shows the
resulting torques for joints 3 and 5 when they were rotated from
90 to 90 CCW, respectively, while joint 2 was fixed at 90 . As
shown in the results, the proper counterbalancing torques were
generated when the maximum gravitational torques of 15.5, 5.2,
and 0.4 Nm were applied to each joint, respectively. However,
due to the counterbalance mechanism, only 1, 0.9, and 0 Nm
were required to operate joints 2, 3, and 5, respectively. Note
that the difference torques shown in Fig. 15(a)(c) show a minus value in certain configurations because the counterbalancing
torque exceeded the gravitational torque. However, the magnitude of the difference torque is always well below the maximum
allowable torque m ax of each joint, which are 16.0, 11.4, and
2.5 Nm for joints 2, 3, and 5 with additional gear ratios of 1:1.9,
1:1.9, and 1:1, respectively. Note that the maximum allowable
torque means the product of the torque of the actuator module
and the additional gear ratio.
B. Counterbalance With an External Load
To show the performance of the proposed robot arm with an
external load, it was assumed that the robot held a 2-kg object at

Fig. 17. Simulation results of gravitational, counterbalancing, and difference

torques with a spring of 4 kN/m stiffness at joint 5.

its gripper. The simulations discussed in Fig. 14 were conducted

again and the results are presented in Fig. 16.
As shown in Fig. 16, the torques required to operate the
robot arm were greatly reduced since the gravitational torques
were compensated for by the counterbalancing torques from the
counterbalance mechanisms. Normally, gravitational torques of
up to 29.6, 13.4, and 2.0 Nm were applied to the three joints,
respectively. Note that these values are above the maximum
allowable torque of each joint. On the other hand, with the
proposed mechanism, the required torque greatly reduced to
13.8, 7.9 and 1.6 Nm, as shown in Fig. 16. They fell below the
maximum allowable torque of the robot arm, which implies that
the arm can be fully controlled with the actuator modules.
Finally, note that the counterbalance mechanism for joint 5
(wrist joint) in Fig. 16 does not seem effective since the gravitational torque due to a 2-kg payload is below the maximum
allowable torque of the actuator module. Suppose that the spring
constant at this joint is increased four times from 1 to 4 kN/m.
The 4 kN/m spring would generate a compensating torque of
1.6 Nm, as shown in Fig. 17. This torque would obviously
overcompensate for the gravitational torque in the case of no
payload, and the actuator would have to provide 1.2 Nm in the
direction of gravity. However, with this increased stiffness of the
spring, the robot could handle even a 4-kg payload, which would
result in a maximum of 3.5 Nm of the gravitational torque, as
shown in Fig. 17. In conclusion, a spring with higher stiffness
could lead to a further increased payload capacity of the robot
arm, which would allow joint 5 to handle more than a 2-kg load.

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end-effector of the robot arm was measured by the digital dial

gauge at the end of each cycle, and it was plotted in Fig. 19(b).
As shown in the results, the position errors of the repeated motion of the counterbalance robot arm were less than 0.25 mm.
These errors were caused mainly by the backlash of the actuator
modules. This repeatability is sufficient to conduct various tasks
such as pick and move or simple assembly, which usually
do not require a high degree of precision.

Fig. 18. Experiments to determine the torque required to move the robot arm
with and without the counterbalance mechanism: (a) experimental setup and
(b) experimental results.

Fig. 19.

Repeatability test: (a) experimental setup and (b) results.

C. Experiments: Counterbalance
The torque required to operate the robot arm with and without
a counterbalance mechanism was measured by the experimental setup shown in Fig. 18(a). Because it is difficult to install an
external torque sensor without changing the robot arm design,
a special sensing device was designed to indirectly measure the
torque. This sensing device consists of a force sensor and a
1-DOF link. The force sensor installed at the end of the sensing
device can measure a contact force acting in the direction orthogonal to the link as shown in Fig. 18(a). Since the rotational
joint of the sensing device was fixed at joint 2 (shoulder joint)
of the robot arm, the force sensor recorded the force exerted on
some known point of distance l away from joint 2, while the
robot arm is rotated from 0 to 180 manually. Since the moment
arm l is known, the torque can be calculated by multiplying the
measured contact force by the link length l.
As shown in the experimental results in Fig. 18(b), the maximum torque required to move joints 2 of the robot arm up
was 10 Nm without the counterbalance mechanism, but was
decreased to 2 Nm with the counterbalance mechanism. This
means that most of the torque required to operate the robot arm
was compensated for by the proposed counterbalance mechanism. A small remaining torque is caused by the friction of the
mechanism.
D. Experiments: Repeatability
Repeatability test for the proposed counterbalance robot arm
was conducted using a digital dial gauge, as shown in Fig. 19(a)
[15], [16]. To measure the repeatability, the robot arm was controlled to move between points A and B, and between A and C
repetitively at an endpoint speed of 1 m/s. The position of the

V. CONCLUSION
A novel counterbalance mechanism composed of springs and
double parallelogram mechanisms were proposed in this paper.
With this proposed mechanism, the proper counterbalancing
torque can be generated to cancel out the gravitational torque
due to the robot mass. Moreover, a counterbalance robot arm
was developed using the proposed counterbalance mechanism.
The following conclusions are drawn from these results.
1) The proposed counterbalance mechanism can compensate
for the gravitational torque due to the robot mass for most
robot configurations.
2) A counterbalance robot arm which requires a much
smaller actuator torque for its motion can be constructed
at a much lower cost than current commercialized robots,
which could lead to the development of robot arms suitable
for service robots.
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KIM AND SONG: MULTI-DOF COUNTERBALANCE MECHANISM FOR A SERVICE ROBOT ARM

[14] (2013). [Online]. Available: http://robotis.com/xe/

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1985.

Hwi-Su Kim received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees

in mechanical engineering from Korea University,
Seoul, Korea, in 2007 and 2014, respectively.
He is currently engaged in postdoctoral work in the
School of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University.
His research interests include manipulator design and
safe robot arms.

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Jae-Bok Song (M00) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Seoul National
University, Seoul, Korea, in 1983 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1992.
He is currently a Professor in the School of
Mechanical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul,
where he has served as the Director of the Intelligent
Robotics Laboratory since 1993. His research interests include safe manipulators, design and control of
robotic systems, and indoor/outdoor navigation.
Dr. Song is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.