Incorporating General Contact Surfaces in the Kinematics of Tendon-Driven Rolling-Contact Joint Mechanisms

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel kinematic model for tendon-driven rolling-contact joints with general contact surfaces, validated experimentally and supported by efficient algorithms and open-source MATLAB code.

Contribution

Introduces the first kinematic model for tendon-driven rolling-contact joints with general contact surfaces, including recursive equations and iterative solution algorithms.

Findings

Model accurately predicts joint configurations.

Algorithms efficiently solve for tendon forces and displacements.

Experimental validation confirms model effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper presents the first kinematic modeling of tendon-driven rolling-contact joint mechanisms with general contact surfaces subject to external loads. We derived the kinematics as a set of recursive equations and developed efficient iterative algorithms to solve for both tendon force actuation and tendon displacement actuation. The configuration predictions of the kinematics were experimentally validated using a prototype mechanism. Our MATLAB implementation of the proposed kinematic is available at https://github.com/hjhdog1/RollingJoint.