Prosthetic Tail: Artificial Anthropomorphic Tail for Extending Innate Body Functions

Abstract

For most mammals and vertebrate animals, tail plays an important role for their body providing variant functions to expand their mobility, or as a limb that allows manipulation and gripping. In this paper, we propose an exploratory biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail design to allow engineering and expanding human body functions. The proposed tail consists of adjacent joints with a spring-based structure to handle shearing and tangential forces, and allow managing the length and weight of the target tail. The internal structure of the tail is driven by four pneumatic artificial muscles providing the actuation mechanism for the tail tip. Here we describe the design and implementation process, and highlight potential applications for using such prosthetic tail.