Design features of the kinematic chain of the ant exoskeleton

• Arroyave-Tobón Santiago
• Drapin Jordin
• Moretto Pierre
• Linares Jean-Marc

• Bio-inspired design
• Ant
• Kinematic chain
• Multibody
• Inverse kinematics

New challenges in engineering design are about resilience, frugality and sustainability. Nature offers remarkable examples of successful mechanical designs that respond to those constraints. Therefore, biological systems deserve to be explored from a design perspective. The study of design features of biological locomotor systems would allow engineers to get inspiration for solving technological problems. The ant Messor barbarus is specialized in load bearing; hence the interest of studying their skeletal structure from an engineering perspective. In this work, we propose a topological architecture of the ant exoskeleton for kinematic analysis. The proposed architecture is obtained by a geometrical analysis of the articular surfaces of the exoskeleton joints. In this analysis, the mobility as well as the geometrical parameters of the joints are estimated from a 3D geometrical model of the ant exoskeleton. This model was obtained from X-ray micro-computed tomography. The proposed topological architecture was implemented in a multibody model and evaluated by means of inverse kinematic simulations. The results of these simulations, in terms of the root mean square errors (RMSE) regarding the input kinematic data, suggest that the proposed topological architecture is able to reproduce well the kinematic during walking of this ant. This study is one step toward a better understanding of the locomotor performance features of ants.