Abstract: A tool holster resiliently engages with a tool upon its insertion with the holster. Positive retention is obtained by rotating a threaded shaft to advance a cam to rotate levers to engage the tool. The lever arms are split to allow a degree of misalignment. Springs bias the arms towards engagement of the tool. This provides an initial resilient entrapment of the tool. Advancement of the threaded shaft causes the cam to close-up the misalignment in the lever arm portions until your removable retention of the total is cheap, a “hard dock”. This final positive retention may contain a small amount of sprung resilience to allow for some overload protection of the mechanism and tool due to an external disturbance (example robot runaway) before rigid retention is engaged.

Abstract: A tool holster resiliently engages with a tool upon its insertion with the holster. Positive retention is obtained by rotating a threaded shaft to advance a cam to rotate levers to engage the tool. The lever arms are split to allow a degree of misalignment. Springs bias the arms towards engagement of the tool. This provides an initial resilient entrapment of the tool. Advancement of the threaded shaft causes the cam to close-up the misalignment in the lever arm portions until your removable retention of the total is cheap, a “hard dock”. This final positive retention may contain a small amount of sprung resilience to allow for some overload protection of the mechanism and tool due to an external disturbance (example robot runaway) before rigid retention is engaged.

Abstract: In a human-in-the-loop robotic control loop, the constrained forces and moments at the gripper (also called hand or end effector) of the manipulator are measured by a force-mement sensor. The resulting force and moment signals are scaled and fed as input voltages to motors in a hand controller to provide torques which oppose deflection of the hand controller. Thus, the operator feels the opposing torques which are proportional to the magnitude of the constrained forces and moments. The force feedback loop may be opened to selectively provide a passive control loop. In either the active or passive mode, the hand controller position signals may be selectively mapped to either gripper position signals or gripper velocity signals in order to control movement of the gripper in the desired manner.