WHY MACHINES THAT BEND ARE BETTER? (COMPLIANT MACHINES)

  The most popular joining approaches used to join two or more bodies together also rely on elastic deformations to achieve their objectives. Most consumer products consist of multiple manufactured parts that need to be joined together during assembly. The joining approach chosen to attach these parts often determines the final product's quality and performance because most failures occur at the interface of the product's joined parts. Although some joining approaches don't rely on elastic deformations such as welding or gluing. The vast majority of such approaches do rely on elastic deformations to fix their parts together. Compliant joints (Screw and Bolts) Screws and bolts are common but unlikely examples of joining elements that rely on compliance to function. At first glance bolted joints may seem like a collection of rigid parts but the bolt itself doesn't successfully join the parts together until its shank begins to stretch as the joint's nut is tightened. I...

  when you think of a machine a robot or a mechanism you likely think of a collection of rigid bodies that work together to achieve a desired task which in the case of jansen linkage is locomotion but when you consider the machines that nature designs you probably don't think of clunky rigid bodies connected together by well-defined joints. Plants and animals tend to be soft bendable and flexible and they use this compliance to achieve tasks that are far more advanced than even the most impressive machines that humans have designed. Nature's Compliance Although its true that some of the rigid machines that humans have designed have managed to outperform nature's compliant machines like jet that can fly much faster than any living creature can but no one denies that nature's flying machines are masterpieces of design that are far more maneuverable, agile and energy efficient than any aircraft humans have ever built. In fact designs that are compliant are advantageous for...

  What do satellite thruster, plastic tool and micro mechanical switch have in common?   well they all contain components that bend so-called compliant mechanisms . But it's always been considered to be bad to have flexibility in your machines well we've tried to take that thing that everybody hates that is trying to avoid and say how can we use flexibility to our advantage? how can we use that to do cool stuff ? so let's start with something basic probably the easiest compliant mechanism was this thing what it is is a compliant mechanism that is a gripper made of plastic so you can put something in there and it will get actually a really high force. So compliant mechanisms have a number of advantages over traditional mechanisms but I thought in order to have a clever pithy way to remember all of these advantages so I came up with the eighth piece of compliant mechanisms and the first of those is part count compliant mechanisms have reduced part count because they have the...