Passive shoulder supports show large potential for a wide range of applications, such as assisting activities of daily living and supporting work-related tasks. The rigid-link architecture used in currently available devices, however, may pose an obstacle to finding designs that offer low protrusion and close-to-body alignment. This study explores the use of mechanisms that employ a flexible element which connects the supported arm to an attachment at the back and acts as energy storage, transmission and part of the load bearing structure. Based on the synthesis method explained in this paper, a large scope investigation into possible flexure-based mechanism topologies is conducted. Thereby, many potential designs are discovered, which are presented, categorized and compared. Two promising designs are developed into prototypes, and are built and tested on a dedicated test bench. These two mechanisms reduce the necessary moment to lift the arm by more than 80 % throughout 85 % of the range of motion, while staying within 18 cm and 10 cm distance from the body, respectively. The study indicates that, due to its lower protrusion and interface loads, a design with a tapered flexure connecting the upper arm via a hinge to a spring-loaded slider at the back offers the most promising solution.

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In this letter we demonstrate a pneumatic bending actuator for upper-limb assistive wearable robots which uses thin McKibben muscles in combination with a flexure strip. The actuator features both active soft actuation and passive gravity support, and in terms of force transmission bridges the gap between the classic rigid type actuators and the emerging soft actuator technologies. Its flexure strip leverages the high-force low-displacement properties of McKibben muscles towards a large rotational range of motion and reduces localized forces at the attachments. We explain the synthesis method by which these actuators can be obtained and optimized for high specific moment output. Physical specimens of three optimized actuator designs are built and tested on a dedicated experimental setup, verifying the computational models. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept upper-limb assistive wearable robot is presented to illustrate a practical application of this actuator and its potential for close-to-body alignment. We found that based on our currently available components actuators can be built which, given a width of 80 mm, are able to produce a moment exceeding 4 Nm at an arm elevation of 90 deg.

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In this paper, we propose a flexure spring based gravity compensation device which provides assistance to lift the forearm. Three different spring designs are obtained and evaluated. The synthesis method to obtain these is explained in detail and an experimental evaluation validates the desired gravity balancing properties. It is found that in comparison to a flexure spring with constant thickness, a variable thickness distribution along the spring leads to a drastic reduction of its width, which amounts to 81 % in the presented case, and offers an energy to weight ratio that is 94 % higher. Employing a nested spring design further increases the storable elastic energy of the variable thickness design by 145 % through utilization of the otherwise unused space within the original spring envelope. A proof-of-concept prototype is built to illustrate a practical implementation. The presented synthesis method provides a tool to obtain gravity balancing flexure springs that offer a promising solution for the design of assistive devices which aim to be both wearable and inconspicuous.@en

The use of overconstrained mechanisms is often avoided in precision mechanics. Misalignments in the mechanism can cause deteriorated system behaviour, such as buckling. Overconstrained designs do have several advantages, such as higher load bearing capacity and higher natural frequencies. However, these advantages are only present if the mechanism is aligned within certain tolerances. In this paper a method is introduced to identify the limits of these alignment tolerances. The method allows the calculation of the forces in the mechanism due to misalignment. The internal forces are compared to the buckling loads of the mechanism yielding the critical misalignments; the method is corroborated using a multibody simulations. Subsequently, both analyses are compared to an experimental setup; this setup measures the first three modal frequencies and identifies the buckling modes. The proposed method and multibody simulation match with each other and the experiment. However, the critical misalignments are about 20% larger in the experiment; this is mainly attributed to hardware imperfections. Due to misalignment and flatness limitations of the flexures, the undeflected stiffness in the experiment is lower than modelled. The deterioration of the support stiffness is smaller in the experiment. In the most serious case, it retains 80% of the modal frequency in the support directions. The proposed method can be used as a guideline to estimate the manufacturing and assembly tolerances of an overconstrained flexure-based mechanism.

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In this paper, a novel design of a fully compliant locking device is presented, for possible application in robotic actuation systems. The synthesis method based on a rigid linkage mechanism is explained, a parametrization scheme is proposed, and an optimization procedure is conducted using kinetostatic flexible multi-body analysis in conjunction with global optimization techniques. The performance of the optimized locking device design is validated via numerical simulations.@en

A flexure strip has constraint characteristics, such as stiffness properties and error motions, that govern its performance as a basic constituent of flexure mechanisms. This paper presents a new modeling approach for obtaining insight into the deformation and stiffness characteristics of general three-dimensional flexure strips that exhibit bending, shear, and torsion deformation. The approach is based on the use of a discretized version of a finite (i.e., nonlinear) strain spatial beam formulation for extracting analytical expressions that describe deformation and stiffness characteristics of a flexure strip in a parametric format. This particular way of closed-form modeling exploits the inherent finite-element assumptions on interpolation and also lends itself for numeric implementation. As a validating case study, a closed-form parametric expression is derived for the lateral support stiffness of a flexure strip and a parallelogram flexure mechanism. This captures a combined torsion–bending dictated geometrically nonlinear effect that undermines the support bearing stiffness when the mechanism moves in the intended degree of freedom (DoF). The analytical result is verified by simulations and experimental measurements.@en

A 3-DoF micro-electromechanical (MEMS) stage has been designed with an innovative integrated feedback system based on thermal sensors. The stage is integrated in the device layer of a silicon-oninsulator-wafer, which means that no assembly is required and the stage can be fabricated using only a single mask. The range of motion is over 160 μm in two directions and 325 mrad of rotation, which exceeds the range of motion of existing MEMS stages by far.@en