Mechanical Characterization of Compliant Cellular Robots. Part I: Passive Stiffness

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the passive stiffness of various mesh topologies in modular cellular robots using finite element analysis, revealing how topology and actuator stiffness influence overall mechanical properties.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic FEA-based method to compare passive stiffness of different mesh topologies within the MACRO framework, highlighting the effects of connectivity and actuation.

Findings

Stiffness increases with nodal connectivity.

Stretching-dominated topologies are stiffer than bending-dominated ones.

Actuator stiffness scales with cross-sectional area in stretching-dominated meshes.

Abstract

Modular Active Cell Robots (MACROs) are a design paradigm for modular robotic hardware that uses only two components, namely actuators and passive compliant joints. Under the MACRO approach, a large number of actuators and joints are connected to create mesh-like cellular robotic structures that can be actuated to achieve large deformation and shape-change. In this two-part paper, we study the importance of different possible mesh topologies within the MACRO framework. Regular and semi-regular tilings of the plane are used as the candidate mesh topologies and simulated using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). In Part 1, we use FEA to evaluate their passive stiffness characteristics. Using a strain energy method, the homogenized material properties (Young's modulus, shear modulus, and Poisson's ratio) of different mesh topologies are computed and compared. The results show that the stiffnesses increase with increasing nodal connectivity and that stretching-dominated topologies have higher stiffness compared to bending-dominated ones. We also investigate the role of relative actuator-node stiffness on the overall mesh characteristics. This analysis shows that the stiffness of stretching-dominated topologies scale directly with their cross-section area whereas the bending-dominated ones do not have such a direct relationship.