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)
Movies
- LCM (MPEG 14.6MB)
- Robotic hand including LCMs (MPEG 5.6MB)
- Takahiro Yoshimura, Mizuho Shibata, and Shinichi Hirai，"Stochastic Static Analysis of Link Driven by Actuator Bundles"，Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems，pp.5685-5690，2009
- Mizuho Shibata, Takahiro Yoshimura, and Shinichi Hirai， "Angle Control of Loosely Coupled Mechanism in 3D Space Using Length Sensors"， Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp.1178-1183, 2007
- Mizuho Shibata, Takahiro Yoshimura, and Shinichi Hirai， "Loosely Coupled Joint Driven by SMA Coil Actuators"， Proc. of the 2007 IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, pp.4460-4465, 2007
- Investigation of Human Dexterity Generated by Loose Joints via Soft Elements: Start-up (No.19800054) 2007 - 2008