Mechanical Design and Analysis of a 3D-printed Planar Compliant-Rigid Hybrid Robot Prototype

In our daily life, rigid-body robots have been widely encountered in many applications, such as industrial robots working in the assembling stream and medical robots for healthcare of patients. Rigid-body robots nowadays achieved great success in load carrying and motion compensation. However, rigid-body robots have strong stiffness during interaction with objects and may not suitable for human utilization. Compliant robotics, on the other hand, is flexible and can modulate stiffness and deformation, resulting comfortable interaction for human bodies. Motivated by taking advantage of both rigid-body robots and compliant robots, in this paper, the design of a planar robot prototype with a hybrid compliant-rigid structure is presented. Forward and inverse kinematics are analyzed for such a compliant-rigid robot. Simulation presents the feasibility of trajectory tracking on such robot for path planning tasks. The designed robot prototype is further manufactured by 3D-printing technique.