An Eccentric Oscillating Speed Reducer Containing a Shock Absorbing Mechanism, and a Humanoid Robot with the Mechanism

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an eccentric oscillating speed reducer equipped with a shock absorbing mechanism and a humanoid robot to which the mechanism is applied. One problem with humanoid robots is that the reducer is sometimes broken down by the impact force at the time of falling down. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel eccentric oscillating speed reducer with a shock absorbing mechanism, and verify its effectiveness by an experiment. In addition, we develop a humanoid robot of the same size as an adult human using the speed reducer and verify the possibility of walking. We also measure the behavior of the joint angle and the duty ratio of the PWM control during walking and discuss the influence of the shock absorbing mechanism from the obtained data.