“Arque: Artificial Biomimicry-Inspired Tail for Extending Innate Body Functions” by Nabeshima, Saraiji and Minamizawa

  • ©Junichi Nabeshima, MHD Yamen Saraiji, and Kouta Minamizawa

  • ©Junichi Nabeshima, MHD Yamen Saraiji, and Kouta Minamizawa

  • ©Junichi Nabeshima, MHD Yamen Saraiji, and Kouta Minamizawa

  • ©Junichi Nabeshima, MHD Yamen Saraiji, and Kouta Minamizawa

Conference:


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Entry Number: 52

Title:

    Arque: Artificial Biomimicry-Inspired Tail for Extending Innate Body Functions

Presenter(s)/Author(s):


Abstract:


    For most mammals and vertebrate animals, the tail plays an important role for their body providing variant functions to expand their mobility, or as a limb that allows manipulation and gripping. In this work, Arque, we propose an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail to allow us to alter our body momentum for assistive, and haptic feedback applications. The proposed tail consists of adjacent joints with a spring-based structure to handle shearing and tangential forces, and allow managing the length and weight of the target tail. The internal structure of the tail is driven by four pneumatic artificial muscles providing the actuation mechanism for the tail tip. Here we highlight potential applications for using such a prosthetic tail as an extension of the human body to provide active momentum alteration in balancing situations, or as a device to alter body momentum for full-body haptic feedback scenarios.

References:


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Acknowledgements:


    This project is supported by JST Kakenhi (HH19177), and JST ACCEL Embodied Media Project (JPMJAC1404), Japan.

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