Geometrie conditions for feedforward positioning of musculoskeletal tendon-driven structure

The human body possesses a musculoskeletal structure in which muscles exist around the bones and joints. The musculoskeletal tendon-driven robot utilizes this structure. This robotic system uses sets of mechanical tendons, such as wire-cables and actuators instead of the vital muscles. The redundant actuation is necessary for the system when it does not actively use any external force nor a tensioner because the mechanical tendon can transmit only a tensile force. This structural characteristic enables feedforward motion-generation that does not need any sensory feedback. However, the convergent posture strongly depends on the tendon-arrangement. Targeting the tendon-driven manipulator, which has two links and six tendons, this paper expands the mathematical conditions for the convergence into the geometric conditions of tendon-arrangement. Based on the geometric conditions, a design method of the tendon-arrangement is discussed.