3DFlex: A rapid prototyping approach for multi-material compliant mechanisms in millirobots

Ryan St. Pierre; Noah Paul; Sarah Bergbreiter

ICRA 2017poster14 citations

3DFlex: A rapid prototyping approach for multi-material compliant mechanisms in millirobots

Ryan St. Pierre, Noah Paul, Sarah Bergbreiter

Abstract

This paper describes an intuitive method for the design and fabrication of small-scale robots with multi-material compliant mechanisms in 3D. The rigid components are 3D printed, and flexures are inserted into the rigid components, creating the final mechanism. The assembled mechanisms are robust, requiring over 1 N of force to delaminate, and surviving 150,000 cycles of bending without failure. A 6 g walking quadrupedal millirobot is presented as a case study for the design and manufacturing methodology. The quadrupedal millirobot has been demonstrated moving at top speeds of 9 mm/s (0.3 body lengths/s).

BibTeX

@inproceedings{icra2017_3dflexarapidprot,
  title = {3DFlex: A rapid prototyping approach for multi-material compliant mechanisms in millirobots},
  author = {Ryan St. Pierre and Noah Paul and Sarah Bergbreiter},
  booktitle = {ICRA 2017},
  year = {2017}
}