ORCID ID

0000-0002-0071-261X, Erivelton Gualter; 0000-0001-6079-3186, Hanz Richter

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-9-2019

Publication Title

Actuators

Abstract

Actuators intended for human–machine interaction systems are usually designed to be mechanically compliant. Conventional actuators are not suitable for this purpose due to typically high stiffness. Advanced powered prosthetic and orthotic devices can vary their stiffness during a motion cycle and are power-efficient. This paper proposes a novel actuator design that modulates stiffness by means of a flexible beam. A motorized drive system varies the active length of the cantilever beam, thus achieving stiffness modulation. New large deflection formulation for cantilever beams with rolling contact constraints is used to determine the moment produced by the actuator. To validate the proposed solution method, an experiment was performed to measure large static deformations of a cantilever beam with the same boundary conditions as in the actuator design. The experiments indicate excellent agreement between measured and calculated contact forces between beam and roller, from which the actuator moment is determined.

Comments

Article #12

This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, grant number 1544702.

DOI

10.3390/act8010012

Version

Publisher's PDF

Volume

8

Issue

1

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