Design and development of a tendon-driven and axial-driven hybrid humanoid leg with high-power motor driving system

High-powered humanoid robots are expected that it can move at a high speed in the same environment as human. In that case, when they receive shocks suddenly, instantaneous impact is applied to the structure of the feet and they can be broken. So, robots require shock-reduction mechanisms. In this paper, we consider a high-powered elastic humanoid robot and we propose a mechanism to make a hybrid leg, which uses a tendon driven joint as an ankle and axial-driven joints as other joints. We designed and developed this shock-reduction mechanisms and verify the validity of this mechanisms.