Design and Development of Inertially Excited Fully Compliant Robot

摘要

Abstract Compliant mechanisms, or flexible machines, deform largely under an external force, displacement, torque, or excitation and mimic motions commonly observed in nature. Due to their unique characteristics, such as the ability to be manufactured as a single piece, no friction between neighboring parts, no backlash, and thus enhanced performance, they are widely used in robot design. In this study, we developed a fully compliant locomotive robot consisting of a top plate, four masses, a rail, four links, support structures, initially preloaded compliant beams, and a disk. Two carts (masses) slide along the rail, with one end of the legs connected to each cart via a small length-flexure hinge, and the other ends converging at the center through a flexure hinge. The initially preloaded compliant beams are vertically attached between the top and bottom masses on each side. Engineers typically design active or passive vibration isolators to dampen undesired vibrations caused by unbalanced masses in a rotating system. However, in our design, we utilized the undesired vibrations to inertially excite the robot. A DC motor, positioned within the support structure and connected to the disk, allows for the addition of small loads to the rotating disk with eccentricity, creating controllable vibrations in amplitude and frequency. While the preloaded beams maintain the robot’s vertical position, they also act as compression springs, facilitating motion transfer. We developed the mathematical model of the locomotive robot using Lagrange equations and analyzed the motion in MATLAB Simulink.