Abstract
This paper presents a redundant musculoskeletal robot using thin McKibben muscles that is based on human anatomy. The purpose of this robot is to achieve motions and characteristics that are very similar to a human body. We use a thin McKibben muscle, which is compliant and flexible, as the actuator of a musculoskeletal robot. Using a bundle of thin McKibben muscles, we develop a multifilament muscle that has characteristics similar to those of human muscles. In contrast, the actuators of conventional musculoskeletal robots are very heavy, not densely attached and have poor backdrivability. Because multifilament muscles are light and can be densely attached, we can attach them to the musculoskeletal robot as skeletal muscle and achieve a redundant system that is equivalent to a human drive mechanism. In this paper, we report a method for fabricating multifilament muscles that imitate various muscles, the development of a lower-limb muscle mechanism for the redundant musculoskeletal robot with thin McKibben muscles and experimental results showing that the proposed musculoskeletal robot achieves humanlike motions that have not yet been reported for other robots.
Highlights
Research on humanoid robots that imitate human drive mechanisms is vigorously carried out worldwide
We report a new method for fabricating multifilament muscles that imitate various muscles, the development of a lower-limb muscle mechanism with the same number of muscles as a human for a musculoskeletal lower-limb robot driven by these multifilament muscles (Fig. 1), and results that compare the prototype’s motions with that of a human
It has been reported by Doi et al [13] that the characteristics of multifilament muscles resemble those of thin McKibben muscles and its contracting force is nearly proportional to the number of muscles, while the contraction ratio is similar to that of a single thin McKibben muscle
Summary
Research on humanoid robots that imitate human drive mechanisms is vigorously carried out worldwide. Our research group believes that we can achieve humanlike behavior by imitating human mechanisms and structure perfectly using muscle placement, redundancy and tendon-driven systems. “Humanlike” mechanisms imply particular mechanisms that conventional robots do not have but a human has. These mechanisms make our robot more similar to a human than other robots. There are motions that are achieved by imitating human motions perfectly, for instance, knee rotation that appears only when the knee is bending or the complex bending motion of an ankle with its many degree of freedom. (1) robotic knees typically consist of a revolute joint with a fixed rotational axis, while human knees consist of a rolling
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