9. Conclusion and outlook

The neck serves as the bird's dexter arm for demanding daily and specialized tasks. As such, it has excellent performance characteristics that are of interest to roboticists. This article describes the implementation of a robot prototype inspired by the bird's neck. Its musculoskeletal architecture is based on a cervical column composed of articulated vertebrae and a large number of muscles and tendons. The whole system is highly complex and cannot be reproduced without prior simplification. The morpho-functional analyses carried out by the biologists and the constraints involved in creating a functional prototype have resulted in a planar robotic architecture with three degrees of freedom, enabling the movements of the woodpecker to be reproduced. The prototype is built according to the tensegrity principle, using a series of three cable-actuated, spring-loaded anti-parallelogram mechanisms...