Abstract
Spacesuit hip joint plays an important role on astronaut activities, such as planetary walking and surveying. This paper proposes a conceptual design of hard hip joint in consideration of the coupling effect of spacesuit hip joint and astronaut thigh. Firstly, lower extremity activities are introduced to illustrate the mobility of hard hip joint, such as walking, kneeing, and abduction. A conceptual design of hard hip joint is explained in detail, including geometric structure, components, design parameters, and mechanism models. Secondly, a 3-linkage coupling mechanism model is built up by synthesizing that conceptual design of hard hip joint. An equiangular dual-perpendicular representation method is brought out to parameterize that mechanism model of hard hip joint. Particularly, four geometric constraints are, respectively, given out to avoid impact between the hip joint and the thigh and to ensure the continuity of thigh motion. Finally, motion equations of hip joint parts are established by using coordinate transformation and vector representation. A case study is conducted to verify the correctness of the proposed representation method and that coupling mechanism model.
Highlights
Hip joint is an important component in spacesuit, which enables mobility of astronauts wearing pressurized spacesuits to complete missions, including walking and surveying
Hard hip joint can avoid above problems because deformation of rigid material caused by pressurized gas is very little
Around a coupling effect of hip joint and thigh, this paper proposes an equiangular dual-perpendicular method to design a conceptual model of hip joint
Summary
Hip joint is an important component in spacesuit, which enables mobility of astronauts wearing pressurized spacesuits to complete missions, including walking and surveying. Spacesuit field involves many topics widely, such as mobility and agility [5], human-suit interaction [6], astronaut injury estimation [7], joint torque testing [8], human movements [9, 10], and gait simulation [11, 12]. Among those topics, hip joint mobility is one of the basic research focuses. A case study is conducted to verify the correctness of the proposed representation method and coupling mechanism model of the hip joint
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