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A design of robotic spine composed of parallelogram actuation modules

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Abstract

Humanoids are being applied into society gradually in the aspect of human–robot interaction recently. The human spine plays an important role when performing natural human upper body postures. However, most of the humanoids only show tense body postures due to the limitations of their simple mechanical structures. We investigated that the human natural spine postures can be imitated by serially connected rigid links with a few joints by the analysis of human spine motion. In this report, we proposed a robotic spine composed of parallelogram actuation modules, and built a prototype. We also investigated the natural spinal postural appearances which are realized by the prototype.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research Grant numbers JP26730136 and JP26700026.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan

    Shiqi Yu, Yoshihiro Nakata, Yutaka Nakamura & Hiroshi Ishiguro

Authors
  1. Shiqi Yu
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  2. Yoshihiro Nakata
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  3. Yutaka Nakamura
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  4. Hiroshi Ishiguro
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shiqi Yu.

Additional information

This work was presented in part at the 22nd International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Beppu, Oita, January 19–21, 2017.

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Yu, S., Nakata, Y., Nakamura, Y. et al. A design of robotic spine composed of parallelogram actuation modules. Artif Life Robotics 22, 477–482 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-017-0383-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-017-0383-0

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