Development of a Bio-inspired Flexible Tail Systemxs

In the animal kingdom, many mammals are using their tails to assure their stability while running, jumping, falling, etc. Researches have been performed in order to add tails on wheeled or legged robots in order to improve their stability. However, those tails are often far from the biological structure and resumed to a simple rigid tube with a mass on the extremity. On the other hand the biological tail is composed of many bones moving one on the other and actuated with an important number of muscles. Therefore replicating this structure would result in big and heavy systems using many actuators that would reduce the physical performances of the robot. In this paper, we developed a new bio-inspired cable-driven tail system capable of swinging a flexible tail from base to tip around the pitching axis using a single actuator. First we designed a new flexible tail mimicking the structure of the animal tail. Then we developed a new actuation system using the combination of cams and drive wheels to realize the actuation of 8 cables using a single actuator. Finally, we measured the efforts generated by the swinging motion of the tail and perform experiments to observe its effects on the jumping motion.