A modular cable-driven humanoid arm with anti-parallelogram mechanisms and Bowden cables

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel modular cable-driven humanoid arm with anti-parallelogram mechanisms (APMs) and Bowden cables. The lightweight arm realizes the advantage of joint independence and the rational layout of the driving units on the base. First, this paper analyzes the kinematic performance of the APM and uses the rolling motion between two ellipses to approximate a pure-circular-rolling motion. Then, a novel type of one-degree-of-freedom (1-DOF) elbow joint is proposed based on this principle, which is also applied to design the 3-DOF wrist and shoulder joints. Next, Bowden cables are used to connect the joints and their driving units to obtain a modular cable-driven arm with excellent joint independence. After that, both the forward and inverse kinematics of the entire arm are analyzed. Last, a humanoid arm prototype was developed, and the assembly velocity, joint motion performance, joint stiffness, load carrying, typical humanoid arm movements, and repeatability were tested to verify the arm performance.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

modular robotic arm / anti-parallelogram mechanism / Bowden cable / humanoid arm / lightweight joint design

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Acknowledgements

Tao Zhang is a China Scholarship Council Fellow and is grateful for the hospitality of the Department of Physical Intelligence at Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where part of this work was done. This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51905105 and 51975126), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (Grant No. 2020A1515011262), the Program for Guangdong Yangfan Innovative and Entrepreneurial Teams, China (Grant No. 2017YT05G026), the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST, China (Grant No. 2021QNRC001), and the Fund of Science and Technology Innovation and Cultivation for Guangdong Undergraduates, China (Grant No. pdjh2021b0157).

Electronic Supplementary Materials

The supplementary materials can be found in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11465-022-0722-2 and are accessible to authorized users.

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