I came up with this concept for a partial rotation, lubricant free, low friction bearing for a robotics application. Two complementary sets of tensioned tendon-like cables (or tapes) serve both to constrain the degrees of freedom of the joint as well as the rolling surface. Here's a render of a model I made to illustrate the idea:
I'm sure that I'm far from the first person to have had this idea, but having no clue about its proper name nor about how to describe it, I'm unable to find anything on the net. I guess it's best described as a kind of flexure, but what exactly? Has this mechanism found any real world applications?