[macdowswe]

Sorry to dig up an old thread here, but whats the progress here?

I am doing some research around safety with CNC machines, and this interests me because it seems it would have the capability to detect when it has hit a foreign object, potentially allowing it to stop if it hits an errant hand before crushing it. Obviously this will only work for machines which have a fairly predictable load/friction, but considering most fingers can withstand 500N briefly before suffering permanent damage, and most CNC machines don't use anywhere near that much feed force, we might be able to design a machine which won't cut your fingers off accidentally.

Yes, this should be quite straightforward with ODrive. I already plan to do automatic machine mass/friction identification, and to use model based feed-forward for most of the control action. So it should be possible to look at the tracking error to identify if there are any major disturbance forces, and hence take action.

The ABB YuMi robot, that I was working on a few years ago, has a similar feature.