Incorporating General Contact Surfaces in the Kinematics of Tendon-Driven Rolling-Contact Joint Mechanisms

MATLAB implementation of Rolling-Contact Joint Mechanism Kinematics with General Contact Surfaces

Overview

This is a MATLAB code of Rolling-Contact Joint Mechanism Kinematics with General Contact Surfaces, the detailed algorithm of which is presented in the paper entitled "Incorporating General Contact Surfaces in the Kinematics of Tendon-Driven Rolling-Contact Joint Mechanisms" (under review).

The code is uploaded for review purpose now. The instruction and the code will be cleaned up once the paper is accepted.

• 6/14/2023: Scripts to plot Fig. 1, Fig. 3, Fig 4 in the first submission have been included (e.g., main_fig1.m, main_fig3.m, and main_fig4.m).
• (We express regret for the delayed code update. We believe that the updated code will better assist the reviewers in evaluating the paper.)

Instruction

(See main_example.m for a simple animated example.)

1. Define cells of links, e.g.,

links{1} = buildLinkType1();
links{2} = buildLinkType2();
links{3} = buildLinkType3();
links{4} = buildLinkType4();
links{5} = buildLinkType5();

2. Build a robot by

robot = BuildRobot(links);

3. Define input tensions, e.g.,

tensions = [1, 2];

or define input displacements and initial tension guess, e.g.,

displacements = [102.2, 93.2];
tensions0 = [1, 1];

4. Solve the Kinematics of the robot for the given tensions as

robot = SolveRJMKin(robot, tensions);

or for the given displacements as

robot = SolveRJMKin_disp(robot, displacements, tensions0);

5. Plot result by

plotRJM(robot);