New Design, Kinematic and Static Force Modeling of a Bio-Inspired Leg Mechanism for Rough Terrain

Abstract

This paper presents an invertebrate leg-like mechanism, which is biologically inspired from invertebrate creatures such as crabs and insects. For the purpose that the leg mechanism could imitate the behavior of the invertebrate animal on rough terrain, it should have the same degree of freedom as the crabs or insects have. The novel leg mechanism consists of 3 joints which linkage has 5 degrees of freedom (DOFS), and mainly depends on a coxa joint driven by a parallel mechanism for the biomimetic motions. The parallel mechanism with 3 DOF is well designed and implemented with the excellent kinematical performances as invertebrate creatures. The mathematical model of the leg mechanism and the kinematical analysis are described, and static force performance characteristics are also discussed. The kinematical performances of the leg mechanism are analyzed by the numerical simulation conducted in biomimetic robots application. The simulation results show the performance of the proposed leg-like mechanism and verify that the leg can be used in the biomimetic robot which could exactly imitate limb motions.