Optimization Design and Performance Analysis of a Bionic Knee Joint Based on the Geared Five-Bar Mechanism

Animal joint motion is a combination of rotation and translational motion, which brings high stability, high energy utilization, and other advantages. At present, the hinge joint is widely used in the legged robot. The simple motion characteristic of the hinge joint rotating around the fixed axis limits the improvement of the robot’s motion performance. In this paper, by imitating the knee joint of a kangaroo, we propose a new bionic geared five-bar knee joint mechanism to improve the energy utilization rate of the legged robot and reduce the required driving power. Firstly, based on image processing technology, the trajectory curve of the instantaneous center of rotation (ICR) of the kangaroo knee joint was quickly obtained. Then, the bionic knee joint was designed by the single-degree-of-freedom geared five-bar mechanism and the parameters for each part of the mechanism were optimized. Finally, based on the inverted pendulum model and the Newton–Euler recursive method, the dynamics model of the single leg of the robot in the landing stage was established, and the influence of the designed bionic knee joint and hinge joint on the robot’s motion performance was compared and analyzed. The proposed bionic geared five-bar knee joint mechanism can more closely track the given trajectory of the total center of mass motion, has abundant motion characteristics, and can effectively reduce the power demand and energy consumption of the robot knee actuators under the high-speed running and jumping gait.