Development of single-shaft joint mechanism imitating a cartilage cushioning

There is a labor shortage due to population decline, and robots are expected to work in human working spaces to address this problem. You need to protect your robot from disturbances that are difficult to predict from multiple directions. Therefore, we simply imitated the connector structure, including the cartilage of the human elbow joint, and incorporated it into the robot’s joints. What we considered was a single axis joint spring element. In this study, the effectiveness of spring elements was predicted using the computer-aided engineering (CAE) function of CAD software. Next, to verify the validity of the prediction results, we conducted a spin test on the motor shaft of the developed uniaxial joint and a destructive test on the frame. These two experimental results show that a single axis joint with a spring element can protect the motor shaft and frame under certain conditions.