Application of the compliant design methodology to manipulators has held the promise of delivering manipulators with many significant advantages, including low cost, small size, low backlash and friction, and high positioning accuracy. This approach has been demonstrated in part by Canfield et. al., [1] to a class of three-degree-of-freedom manipulators based on a specific parallel architecture topology. In [1], the authors’ intent was to develop two compliant manipulators that exhibit several of the features associated with compliant devices. However, upon review of the manipulators resulting from this work it is observed that many of the benefits that were expected were lost at some point in the design process, resulting in manipulators that were large, expensive and suffered significantly from required assembly and inaccuracies in manufacture. This paper will revisit the problem addressed in [1], using the modeling tools demonstrated in that paper but will present several improved development measures that will result in manipulators that exhibit multiple features promised by compliant devices. The resulting manipulators will then be compared against the manipulators from [1] with a summary of the performance and characteristics of each given and evaluated.
A low cost testbed and test-design methodology for nanosatellite sub-/systems