The aim of this project is to design a new mechanism for a foot of a humanoid in order to use it as a toy with the possibility of using it also as a prosthesis or an orthopaedic robotic foot.
This project has been done in collaboration with the research centre The Cognition & Interaction Lab (COIN) at the School of Humanities and Informatics of the University of Skövde. The mechanism should be able to have human-like movements. First of all, existing humanoid feet have been analysed in a market research in order to obtain an overview of existing mechanisms and how they work.
Some interesting ideas have been developed taking into account the goals and the defined user requirements. Some concept evaluation methods have been used to choose the best idea taking into account the opinion of the research centre.
This process leads to the final idea of creating a parallel actuator system using three pneumatic cylinders and it is designed in 3D using Pro/Engineer. To create the model, actuators have been chosen from the pneumatic manufacturer Parker. The 3D model was tested in Pro/E mechanism to verify that the cylinders are powerful enough to create the motion of walking.
The conclusion is that most of the goals have been achieved. However, the cover of the foot has not been designed yet due to time constraints. For further work it would be interesting creating a plastic prototype too for testing the mechanism before creating the metallic prototype. Moreover it has to be mentioned that the opinion of the research centre has been of a substantial important for the project.
Source: University of Skövde
Author: Parra Lete, Enara | Rodríguez García, Verónica