Design and manufacture of calf-link with knee joint torque sensor for a tendon-driven walking assistant robot

Abstract

In this paper, the design and fabrication of the calf-link with knee joint torque sensor of a tandem-driven walking-assist robot is described. Tendon-driven walking-assist robots should be designed and constructed with a wire wheel and a torque sensor, as one body to reduce the weight of the calf link. The torque sensor consists of four plate sensing parts crossed 90° around the wire wheel. Structural analysis was performed to determine the size of the torque sensor sensing part, and a torque sensor was built by attaching a strain gauge to the sensing part. As a result of the characteristics test, the reproducibility error and the nonlinearity error of the manufactured torque sensor were less than 0.03% and 0.04%, respectively. As a result of the calibration, the reproducibility error and the nonlinearity error were less than 0.08%, respectively. Thus, it is considered that the knee joint torque sensor of the calf link can be attached to the tandem-driven walking-assist robot. Copyright ? The Korean Society for Precision Engineering.