Analysis of human running has revealed that the motion of the human leg can be modeled by a compression spring because the leg's joints behave like a torsion spring in the stance phase. Moreover, the knee bends rapidly to avoid contact of the foot with the ground in the swing phase. In this paper, we describe the development of a knee joint mechanism that mimics the elastic characteristics of the stance leg and rapid bending knee of the idling leg of a running human. The knee was equipped with a mechanism comprising two leaf springs and a worm gear for adjusting the joint stiffness and high-speed bending knee. Using this mechanism, we were able to achieve joint stiffness within the range of human knee joints that could be adjusted by varying the effective length of one of the leaf springs. In addition, the mechanism was able to bend rapidly by changing the angle between the two leaf springs. The equation proposed for calculating the joint stiffness considers the difference between the position of the fixed point of the leaf spring and the position of the rotational center of the joint. We evaluated the performance of the adjustable joint stiffness and the effectiveness of the proposed equation for joint stiffness and high-speed knee bending. We were able to make a bipedal robot hop using pelvic oscillation for storing energy produced by the resonance to leg elasticity and confirmed the mechanism could produce large torque 210 Nm.
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