A Cable-Pulley Transmission for Ankle Joint Actuation in Artificial Leg

In this paper a cable-pulley transmission is proposed as the angular actuation system in ankle joints of artificial legs with human-scale design. The ankle articular characteristics in human and robotic ankles are discussed toward a proper design solution for efficient and accurate operation in coordination with leg motion. A flow chart of a design procedure is introduced for mechatronic iterative optimal design. A mechanical design is elaborated for ankle angular pitch DOF and it is used for dynamic simulation in ADAMS environment. Simulation results are discussed to characterize both the performance and feasibility of the proposed design. A simulated validation is reported as an approximate operating solution of human-walking in order to show the main advantages of the proposed design in possible humanoid robot implementations.