During rapid movements, tendons can act like springs, temporarily storing work done by muscles and then releasing it to power body movements. For some activities, such as frog jumping, energy is released from tendon much more rapidly than it is stored, thus amplifying muscle power output. The period during which energy is loaded into a tendon by muscle work may be aided by a catch mechanism tha...

After spinal cord injury (SCI), alterations in intrinsic motoneuron properties have been shown to be partly responsible for spastic reflex behaviors in human SCI. In particular, a dysregulation of voltage-dependent depolarizing persistent inward currents (PICs) may permit sustained muscle contraction after the removal of a brief excitatory stimulus. Windup, in which the motor response increases...

Compliant Actuators are desirable for human friendly robotics, especially for assistive and rehabilitation robots that have direct physical interaction with human users. Various designs of Series Elastic Actuators (SEA) have been developed for these applications. This paper presents a novel SEA design with variable impedance for human-friendly robotics applications that overcomes the major limi...

This article describes methods and strategies used to develop a humanoid robot with a distributed architecture approach where centralized and local control co-exist and concur to provide robust full monitoring and ef cient control of a complex system with 22 DOF. A description of the hardware is given before introducing the architecture, since that greatly influences the methods implemented for...

We have previously shown that abduction angular perturbations applied to the knee consistently elicit reflex responses in knee joint musculature. Although a stabilizing role for such reflexes is widely proposed, there are as of yet no studies quantifying the contribution of these reflex responses to joint stiffness. In this study, we estimate the mechanical contributions of muscle contractions ...

The membrane-type air spring can be used to suppress lateral vibration of a isolation table. However, compared voice coil actuators, pneumatic actuators are difficult use for precise control, because servo valves have nonlinear dynamic characteristics. Therefore, such as placed in parallel with springs, allowing force-type provide additional force the system. These generate force. In case ball-...

En este artículo se presenta el diseño del CANSAT Heliospectrum[1] desarrollado para su aplicación en percepción remota y análisis de imágenes competir concurso anual realizado por la Sociedad Sistemas Electrónicos Aeroespaciales (AESS), capítulo Colombia. El equipo Helios, desarrollador CANSAT, hace parte grupo investigación ASTRA Universidad Antioquia. realizó siguiendo las restricciones impu...