Chew on this: Design of a 6DOF anthropomorphic robotic jaw

This paper describes an electro-mechanical and software architecture for the development of an anthropomorphic 6 DOF robotic jaw. The architecture comprises the aggregate of motion components needed to position a prosthetic jaw in 3D space. This architecture frees the jaw kinematics from the dependency of constraints in the mechanical assembly allowing for the fabrication of mechanical systems that can simulate jaw motions beyond human capabilities. The orthogonal and concurrent nature of the structural design makes systems based on this idea potentially the easiest to control. To illustrate our concept two distinct prototypes are produced. Construction of these models resulted in the first two modular anthropomorphic robotic jaws to be built with 6-DOF. Areas of application for this mechanical design include dentistry, speech research, and facial gesture affect research.