Experimental verification on novel robot arm equipped with bi-articular driving mechanism

Abstract

This paper describes a novel design of robot arm and its experimental verification. The proposed robot arm has a bi-articular driving mechanism. The bi-articular driving mechanism drives both shoulder and elbow joints simultaneously like a bi-articular muscles of animals. The mechanism is built by timing belt and pulleys. The proposed robot arm mimics human upper arm with 3 DC motors working as three muscular pairs. First design and development of robot arm are described. Then several experiments verifies that the bi-articular driving mechanism can work on both two joints. Furthermore its redundant actuation system can work well, if any one actuator is removed.