Musculoskeletal Lower-Limb Robot Developed Using McKibben Multifilament Muscles

There is an abundance of research around the world that focuses on humanoid robots that can imitate human drive mechanisms - mechanisms that humans have, but conventional robots don’t. A team of researchers from Japan have developed a musculoskeletal robot that uses thin McKibben muscles as an actuator to build a multifilament muscle that has characteristics similar to those of lower-limb human muscles.

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Muscoskeletal robots with tendon-driven systems, usually composed of motors, are known to better imitate human motions and characteristics than any other drive mechanism. Previous robots, such as Kenshiro and ECCEROBOT, have been designed with tendon-drive systems similar to that of humans but are very heavy, not densely attached to the muscles and have a poor backdrivability. So, such robots have been found to produce a redundancy that is not comparable to that of a human.

A McKibben artificial muscle is an actuator with a similar elasticity and compliance similar to human muscles. They are also compatible with tendon-driven mechanisms. Previous efforts many decades ago yielded some robots using McKibben muscles, but were limited in the number of muscles on each leg. Even so, such robots have provided a good platform for current research, especially when they have been found to previously work in a basic fashion.