An Approach of Facilitated Investigation of Active Self-healing Tension Transmission System Oriented for Legged Robots

Abstract

Self-healing robotics has been of considerable interest. We believe the function will have a major role in legged robots as a typical high-load application of robotics. Some pioneering works have been ongoing on self-healing soft robots. However, the development of large load self-healing component and its system integration with a life-sized legged robot is a challenging task. This study is to try the problem by a constructing self-healing component oriented for facilitated investigation. Proposed part enhances visibility and manufacturing by specializing tension transmission system. The developed module was evaluated by several experiments. First, healing visualization experiment was conducted to evaluate healing progress. In addition, the module's strength was tested using a motor-driven tendon module previously developed in our laboratory. Results of these experiments suggested that the stirring process have a major role in performing self-healing behaviour. Finally, we conducted a preliminary experiment on a tendon-driven legged robot. The experiment demonstrated that the module functioned in a real robot once.