Design of tendon driven humanoid’s lower body equipped with redundant and high-powered actuators

This paper presents how to develop a lower body with both redundant and high-powered actuator systems toward the next version of a fully tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid, which will be able to realize various flexible motions using whole body. The newly developed lower body has 44 actuators and each actuator can generate 25[kgf] muscle force continually. We propose the new design method of hollowing out the parts assembly areas, which realizes easy design of the skeleton with massive actuators. Finally we presented an experiment on the hip muscles tension and redundancy performances during the hip joint rotation motion.