Abstract
This paper introduces an innovative robotic foot design inspired by the functionality and the anatomy of the human foot. Most humanoid robots are characterized by flat, rigid feet with limited mobility, which cannot emulate the physical behavior of the foot–ground interaction. The proposed foot mechanism consists of three main bodies, to represent the heel, plant, and toes, connected by compliant joints for improved balancing and impact absorption. The functional requirements were extracted from medical literature, and were acquired through a motion capture system, and the proposed design was validated with a numerical simulation.
Highlights
Humanoid robotics has fascinated and challenged scientists for decades [1]
The behavior of the humanoid foot was checked through a nonlinear, dynamic study using FEA
The humanoid foot is composed of four bodies, three of which are in ABS rigid plastic (Table 2), and the middle of which is set to thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) for his flexible mechanical properties, simulating the muscle part
Summary
Humanoid robotics has fascinated and challenged scientists for decades [1]. The design of humanoid robots has evolved from the serial design of the first humanoids, such as WABOT (WAseda roBOT) [2], to more refined architectures [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Despite decades of research, the mobility of most of these robots is still limited to the legs, arms, hands, and head only, with very few examples including torso [10] and foot [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. Foot designs with three segments have been proposed to better mimic human-like motion [21,22], but are usually characterized by active mechanisms that require a complex control and motion coordination with the rest of the body [21], or by planar rigid-body mechanisms [22] that achieve balance through spring-loaded joints only. Element Analysis (FEA) and Multibody Dynamics, and a prototype is manufactured with
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