Design of Programmable Passive Compliance Shoulder Mechanism

Design of mechanical compliance would be one of the most important technical foci in making humanoid robots really interactive with the humans. For safety insurance the mechanical compliance should be developed to humanoid robots. The introduction of the passive compliance to humanoid robots has large possibility to achieve the human skill by using the dynamical energy stored in the compliant members. The programmable passive compliance plays an important role to cope with the changing environments and task execution. In this paper, we evaluate the e ectiveness of the passive compliance for the realization of the human skill and design a programmable passive compliance mechanism 'PPC cybernetic shoulder' which is the four degree of freedom shoulder mechanism for humanoid robots using a closed kinematic chain. The programmability of the PPC cybernetic shoulder is evaluated by experiments.