Research on a Biomimetic Flexible Ball Joint With Variable Stiffness for Robots

The human ball joint is a compact and flexible 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) composite joint. The ball joints commonly used in robot design lack active driving capability. Ball joints with active drive generally consist of three single-degree-of-freedom joints connected in series, which is a noncompacted structure and easily leads to singular postures. In order to meet the demand for high-performance composite joint modules for service robots, this article designs a flexible biomimetic spherical robot joint with variable stiffness characteristics: the mechanism of muscle parallel antagonistic drive and ligament wrapping constraint is simulated; three parallel branch chains are used to drive three composite degrees-of-freedom; ropes, soft airbags, and series elastic drive gears are used to form a flexible transmission system; the contour of the rope winch has been optimized with the aim of transmission stability; and a pneumatic variable stiffness soft structure has been designed and fabricated. A compliance control algorithm for joints was developed based on the principle of impedance control. The research results indicate that the biomimetic ball-and-socket joint has a compact structure, a wide range of motion and good motion tracking performance, variable stiffness performance, and flexible interaction ability.