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The Effect of Large Deflections of Joints on Foldable Miniature Robot Dynamics

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Abstract

In miniature robotics applications, compliant mechanisms are widely used because of their scalability. In addition, compliant mechanism architecture is compatible with the manufacturing methods used to fabricate small scale robots, such as “foldable robotics”, where the size and the materials used allow much larger deflections. In this paper, the kinematics of compliant mechanisms used in miniature foldable robots are investigated with the assumption of nonlinear large deflections that occur at the flexure joints. The solution of the large beam deflection is acquired using elliptic integrals and is verified with finite element analysis and experiments on a simple small foldable leg linkage. The large deflection model takes joint strain energies into account and yields accurate estimations for load capacity of the mechanism as well as the necessary input torque for actuation of the leg. Therefore, the model presented can be used to estimate the load capacity of a miniature robot, as well as to select appropriate actuators. The work is also extended to estimate the compliant leg kinematics and rigid body dynamics of a foldable robot. The robot’s large deflection simulation results are compared with experiments and a simplified rigid-link pin-joint kinematic model. Our results demonstrate the modeling accuracy of the two approaches and can be used by foldable robotics community when deciding on the strategy to choose for modeling their robots.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all members of Bilkent Miniature Robotics Laboratory for their invaluable contributions to this work. This project is funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) through 3001 program (Grant number: 215 M366).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Miniature Robotics Laboratory, Mechanical Engineering Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

    Cem Karakadıoğlu, Mohammad Askari & Onur Özcan

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  1. Cem Karakadıoğlu
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  2. Mohammad Askari
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  3. Onur Özcan
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Correspondence to Onur Özcan.

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Karakadıoğlu, C., Askari, M. & Özcan, O. The Effect of Large Deflections of Joints on Foldable Miniature Robot Dynamics. J Intell Robot Syst 100, 15–28 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-020-01169-1

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