Active spherical joint for modular reconfigurable mobile robot

The present reconfigurable robots have several shortcomings about workspace and output torque in the pose-adjusting mechanisms. Aiming at these problems, a novel active joint was developed, which took advantages of the parallel mechanism and the serial mechanism and had characteristics of high output torque and large workspace. The parallel part is able to pitch and yaw ±40° with 17.3 N·m output torque and the serial part can rotate 360° with 4.5 N·m output torque provided. The application of this mechanism to mobile robots will highly enrich the configurations of the robots, and consequently develop their adaptive abilities to environments. The kinematic and workspace analysis were showed. The drive torque of the joint was tested, and it's functionalities experimentally using the robot-JL-I were verified.