Design of a Bio-Inspired Equine Robot Prototype

Abstract

Bio-inspired design is a science field attempting to create different technological systems based on the nature, as for example the bio-sensors, bio-materials and bio-actuators. These last are a new category of the bio-inspired design trying to develop new locomotion systems for mobile robotics taking as reference the behavior of different animals, like reptiles, birds and mammals such as the case of the horse. The study of the horse anatomy has allowed to create quadruped robots, showing important advantages over common mobile robots. One of these advantages is the operation in different types of environments, considering that a great part of the earth’s surface complicates the mobility of the robots based on wheels. In this way the present paper shows the design of a robot inspired to the behavior of the horse limb. In first place the design of a mathematical model of the horse skeleton and its muscles by using the Denavit-Hartenberg method was performed for further dynamic analysis. Once the dynamic analysis was done, the mechanical simulation with the zoometric data of Colombian horse of paso-fino type was elaborated by a CAD software known as SolidWorks, obtaining as a result the physical data related to the movement of the robot. The proposed design tries to conserve the proportion between biologic system and the bio-inspired robot, with the objective to achieve an optimum performance and similarity of mechanical develop, and its general structure.