Design and operation of MinIAQ: An untethered foldable miniature quadruped with individually actuated legs

Abstract

This paper presents the design, development, and basic operation of MinIAQ, an origami-inspired, foldable, untethered, miniature quadruped robot. Instead of employing multilayer composite structures similar to most microrobotic fabrication techniques, MinIAQ is fabricated from a single sheet of thin A4-sized PET film. Its legs are designed based on a simple four-bar locomotion mechanism that is embedded within its planar design. Each leg is actuated and controlled individually by separate DC motors enabling gait modification and higher degree of freedom on controlling the motion. The origami-inspired fabrication technique is a fast and inexpensive method to make complex 3D robotic structures through successive-folding of laser-machined sheets. However, there is still a need for improvement in modulating and extending the design standards of origami robots. In an effort to addressing this need, the primitive foldable design patterns of MinIAQ for higher structural integrity and rigidity are presented in detail. The current robot takes less than two hours to be cut and assembled and weighs about 23 grams where 3.5 grams is the weight of its body, 7.5 grams is its motors and encoders, 5 grams is its battery, and about 7 grams is its current on-board electronics and sensors. The robot is capable of running about 30 minutes on a single fully charged 150mAh single cell LiPo battery. Using the feedback signals from the custom encoders, MinIAQ can perform a trot gait with a speed of approximately 0.65 Bodylengths/sec, or equivalently 7.5 cm/s.

Miniature Modular Legged Robot With Compliant Backbones

“…SMoLBot robot's modules are folded using 100-micrometerthick flexible A4 size cellulose acetate sheets. The main structural material, as well as the compliant flexure joint design approach are very similar to other miniature foldable robots such as MinIAQ [11]. In order to increase structural integrity of the body, certain folded structures such as T-folds and tab-and-fastener Getting the smallest robot housing was aimed during the design process.…”

“…Origami-inspired robot fabrication, which consists of transforming a two dimensional paper sheet to a three dimensional complex design with subsequent foldings, is another method to manufacture miniature robots [9], [10]. This method requires laser cutting acetate sheets with an initial robot design that is compatible to be folded into a three dimensional mechanism that serves as the fundamental base structure of the robot body [11]. Soft Modular Legged Robot (SMoLBot), shown in Fig.…”

C-Quad: A miniature, foldable quadruped with C-shaped compliant legs

“…In order to come up with a structure that can sustain required rigidity and robustness, specialized folds become essential. Initially, T-shaped folds, first introduced in [21], are exploited to increase the stiffness of the body structure of the robot. T-folds are out-of-plane extensions that can be added to arbitrary places within a body to stiffen it.…”

MiniCoRe: A Miniature, Foldable, Collision Resilient Quadcopter

“…Foldable robotics [7], [8], [9], [10], [11] offer a number of advantages for the design and manufacturing of MAVs. Suitability of abundant, lightweight materials allows for lighter structural designs compared to conventional manufacturing methods by trading design complexity.…”