Food Chewing Robotics

Investigators: Peter Xu, John Bronlund, Loulin Huang and Johan Potgieter

Funded by: Foundation of Research, Science and Technology

A life-sized masticatory robot of 6RSS parallel mechanism is dealt with in the paper, which is intended to chew foods in a human way while the food properties are evaluated. The robotic mechanism is proposed and its kinematic parameters are defined according to the biomechanical findings and measurements of the human masticatory system. For a given mandibular trajectory to be tracked, the closed form solution to inverse kinematics of the robot is found for joint actuations while differential kinematics is derived in Jacobian. Major features of the built robot including the motion control system are presented. Experimental results for free chewing, soft-food chewing and hard-food chewing are given where the foods are simulated by foam and hard objects, and crank actuations and driving torques (an indication of muscular activities) required are compared for the chewing of different foods.