Bio-Inspired Tensegrity Flexural Joints
Erik Jung, Victoria Ly, Nicholas Cessna, Mai Linh Ngo, Dennis Castro, Vytas SunSpiral, Mirca Teodorescu
Abstract
Most robotics literature model the human's knee and hip as a revolute joint with limited range of rotation. Although somehow close to reality, this approach neglects a critical aspect of these joints, which is their internal flexibility. This paper presents a prototype tensegrity flexural manipulator whose kinematic behavior is inspired by human leg's gait. This prototype, which considers a hybrid (flexible-rigid) structure of the knee and hip would be able to better approximate real behavior and hopefully lead to a better design of artificial (prosthetic) knees and hips. The behavior of the proposed tensegrity manipulator was firstly predicted using OpenSim simulation environment. The paper reports the comparisons between the simulations, physical prototypes and human leg behavior for a variety of ranges of motions and tension analysis.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2018_bioinspiredtense,
title = {Bio-Inspired Tensegrity Flexural Joints},
author = {Erik Jung and Victoria Ly and Nicholas Cessna and Mai Linh Ngo and Dennis Castro and Vytas SunSpiral and Mirca Teodorescu},
booktitle = {ICRA 2018},
year = {2018}
}