Vibration analysis of a bio-inspired flexible parallel mechanism

This paper studies the vibration characteristic of a bio-inspired flexible parallel mechanism, which consists of a fixed base and a moving platform connected by three cables and a compression spring. The spring serves as cervical spine to support and facilitate the motion of moving platform corresponding to human head. The cables serve as the muscles around human neck to drive the mechanism. In order to study the the vibration characteristic, Lagrange Equation is employed to derive the dynamic model of the robotic neck system. To simplify the modeling, the driving cables are taken as massless. And the flexible spring is regarded as an Euler-Bernoulli beam with fixed-free boundary conditions and then the assumed mode method is used to model the structural flexibility. Numerical simulations on free vibration and forced vibration are performed to demonstrate and analyze the vibration characteristics of the bio-inspired flexible parallel mechanism.