Tendon based full size biped humanoid robot walking platform design

Abstract

Actuators and gear trains of most biped humanoid robots are divergently allocated on the links of two legs. Disadvantages of such a mechanical design are complicated wiring of power cord and sensing/ control signal bundles and imprecise kinetics models of mixed link-and-actuator structures. Based on these drawbacks, this paper proposes a tendon-driven mechanism to develop a lower body structure of a full-size biped humanoid robot. The actuators are compacted as an actuator module, and they are placed at a distal site. A 12 degree-of-freedom mechanical structure is proposed with 100 cm in height and 45 kg in weight. The gait planning module is simulated and evaluated using the Matlab software. At the same time, an ARM7 based controller is developed to automatically generate walking patterns as well as to control the motors. Finally, a tendon-driven biped humanoid robot prototype is realized for practical waling control in the future. © 2009 Springer.