Laminated micro-machine: Design and fabrication of a flexure-based Delta robot

Abstract

Mesoscale electromechanical systems find applications in fields such as medical instrumentation, soft robotics, microscopy, flexible electronics and imagining. This paper implements the printed circuit MEMS (PC-MEMS) process [1]for the fabrication of a 'pop-up' flexure-based mesoscale systemthat exploits the simplicity of 2-D manufacturing techniques such assheet-metal operations and laser cutting to realize a 3-D mechanism. The fabrication of a laminated Delta robot with prismatic actuation is presented to exemplify this process. A working device with actuation and functional components such as linear guides, stepper motors and limit switches is designed and fully realized. Because the mechanism is popped out of the plane to achieve its3D shape, we present a stiffness analysis to arrive at the out-of-plane (or 'pop-out') angles that the planar system must accommodate so that constraints/limits on actuator torque/force can be can satisfied while producing an operational system. The simplicity of the processes makes it a candidate for the use in the emerging open-source hardware technologies forfabricating low-cost, complex, electromechanical systems.

A Low-Cost Compliant Gripper Using Cooperative Mini-Delta Robots for Dexterous Manipulation

“…However, soft robots require a departure from classical methods for design, fabrication, and control [9]. The design of our compliant delta robot is similar to the laminate millimeterscaled delta robot [10] [11] and compliant parallelogram links characterized in [12]. Unique from these two approaches, we use 3D-printing for fabrication and linear actuators to create a prismatic delta rather than rotary motors for a revolute delta.…”

Robust Control for Nonlinear Delta Parallel Robot With Uncertainty: An Online Estimation Approach

“…Remark 5: For any rigid serial type robots with revolute and slide joints, M (α, ζ, t) is related to the parameters of the inertia matrix and the positions of the joints, which means there exists a set of constants κ j such that for all (α, t) ∈ R 3 × R, ζ ∈ , the euclidean norm of the inertia matrix satisfies (22).…”

“…Suppose the desired trajectory (path type I) of robot be [0, 0, 0] T ,ρ 0 = 2. Considering the system performance and the control cost, we choose the control parameters: T v = diag [9,9,9], T p = diag [3,3,3], D = diag [9,9,9], β = 0.1 and ξ = 0.001. With a high sensitivity for the uncertainty, the online estimation parameters are chosen as follows: First, the simulation results under the adaptive robust control design I are shown in Fig.…”

“…The Delta parallel robot with three lightweight parallelograms, one of the most popular parallel robot, inherits all the virtues of the traditional parallel robots and possesses some distinct features such as, the closed form kinematics (both forward and inverse), the decoupled translational positions and rotational orientations of the moving platform (which improves the motion accuracy). Motivated by the above features, the Delta parallel robot has been applied in many sophisticated fields, e.g., microelectronics [3], [4], medicine [5], [6], intelligent logistics [7], [8], and 3D printing [9], [10]. In those sophisticated applications, the high-precision control of Delta parallel robot has become a critical issue for the researchers.…”

Unified Kinematics of Prismatically Actuated Parallel Delta Robots

“…32 Among 3-DOF parallel manipulators, the delta robot with prismatic actuation (i.e., the linear delta robot) has recently caught more attention because of its advantages like very rapid positioning with high accuracy and improved stiffness. 33,34 The linear delta structure can be particularly important for applications like ultra-fast 3D printing 35 or for haptic feedback generation once occupied with direct drive actuators. 36 Motivated from those advantages, this paper investigates a unified and fully parametric kinematics formulation for the linear delta robot family.…”