Mandibular movement experiment of a masticatory robot

A masticatory robot that can simulate jaw movement and occlusal forces like human will find many applications in dentistry, food science and biomechanics. Based on the biological finding about mastication system and its motion characteristics, an actuation redundant parallel mechanism with point contact higher kinematic pair (6PUS-2HKP) for simulating mastication movement is introduced. The coordinate system of the robot is established. The kinematics of this redundantly actuated spatial parallel mechanism is derived. In order to test the robot's performance, a mouth opening and closing trajectory was planned. Experiment result shows that the robot can perform one full mouth opening and closing cycle within 1 s and the robot is able to reproduce the mouth opening and closing movements like humans.