Loosely coupled mechanism

Human joints contain a fluid, which is known to play an important role, changing the properties of the porous cartilage and tissue by moving in and out of them, and altering the pressure within the joint. This suggests that the motion and the compliance of a human shoulder joint may be realized by a mechanism with soft material. We propose a novel link mechanism to investigate effects of soft component in control of a human-like joint. Here, we introduce a robotic prototype of an arm with a loosely coupled joint modeled on the human arm, with viscoelastic material and soft actuators functioning as the cartilage and muscles of a loosely coupled joint. We use Shape Memory Arroy (SMA) coil actuators as the soft actuators (Figure 1).




Fig.1: Loosely coupled mechanism (LCM)

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