科创中国

Planar kinematics has been studied systematically based on centrodes, however axodes are underutilized to set up the curvature theories in spherical and spatial kinematics. Through a spherical adjoint approach, an axode-based theoretical system of spherical kinematics is established. The spherical motion is re-described by the adjoint approach and vector equation of spherical instant center is concisely derived. The moving and fixed axodes for spherical motion are mapped onto a unit sphere to obtain spherical centrodes, whose kinematic invariants totally reflect the intrinsic property of spherical motion. Based on the spherical centrodes, the curvature theories for a point and a plane of a rigid body in spherical motion are revealed by spherical fixed point and plane conditions. The Euler-Savary analogue for point-path is presented. Tracing points with higher order curvature features are located in the moving body by means of algebraic equations. For plane-envelope, the construction parameters are obtained. The osculating conditions for plane-envelope and circular cylindrical surface or circular conical surface are given. A spherical four-bar linkage is taken as an example to demonstrate the spherical adjoint approach and the curvature theories. The research proposes systematic spherical curvature theories with the axode as logical starting-point, and sets up a bridge from the centrode-based planar kinematics to the axode-based spatial kinematics.

In design of flexure mechanism, diminishing the parasitic-motion is a key point to improve the accuracy. However, most of existing topics concentrate on improving the accuracy of linear-motion flexure mechanisms via compensating the parasitic error, but few research the multi-dimensional flexure mechanisms. A general design principle and method for high-precision flexure mechanisms based on the parasitic-motion compensation is presented, and the proposed method can compensate the parasitic rotation in company with translation, or the parasitic translation in company with rotation, or both. The crucial step for the method is that the parasitic motion of a flexure mechanism is formulated and evaluated in terms of its compliance. The overall compliance matrix of a general flexure mechanism is formulated by using screw theory firstly, then the criteria for the parasitic motions is introduced by analyzing the characteristics of the resultant compliance matrix as well as with aid of the concept of instantaneous rotation center. Subsequently, a compliance-based compensation approach for reducing parasitic-motion is addressed as the most important part. The design principles and procedure are further discussed to help with improving the accuracy of flexure mechanisms, and case studies are provided to illustrate this method. Finally, an analytical verification is provided to demonstrate that the symmetry design philosophy widely used in flexure design can effectively improve accuracy in terms of the proposed method. The proposed compensation method can be well used to diminish the parasitic-motion of multi-dimensional flexure mechanisms.

Most of current running quadruped robots have similar construction: a stiff body and four compliant legs. Many researches have indicated that the stiff body without spine motion is a main factor in limitation of robots' mobility. Therefore, investigating spine motion is very important to build robots with better mobility. A planar quadruped robot is designed based on cheetahs' morphology. There is a spinal driving joint in the body of the robot. When the spinal driving joint acts, the robot has spine motion; otherwise, the robot has not spine motion. Six group prototype experiments with the robot are carried out to study the effect of spine motion on mobility. In each group, there are two comparative experiments: the spinal driving joint acts in one experiment but does not in the other experiment. The results of the prototype experiments indicate that the average speeds of the robot with spine motion are 8.7%–15.9% larger than those of the robot without spine motion. Furthermore, a simplified sagittal plane model of quadruped mammals is introduced. The simplified model also has a spinal driving joint. Using a similar process as the prototype experiments, six group simulation experiments with the simplified model are conducted. The results of the simulation experiments show that the maximum rear leg horizontal thrusts of the simplified mode with spine motion are 68.2%–71.3% larger than those of the simplified mode without spine motion. Hence, it is found that spine motion can increase the average running speed and the intrinsic reason of speed increase is the improvement of the maximum rear leg horizontal thrust.

The design work of motional cable in products is vital due to the difficulty in estimating the potential issues in current researches.In this paper,a physics-based modeling and simulation method for the motional cable harness design is presented.The model,based on continuum mechanics,is established by analyzing the force of microelement in equilibrium.During the analysis procedure,three coordinate systems:inertial,Frenet and main-axis coordinate systems are used.By variable substitution and dimensionless processing,the equation set is discretized by differential quadrature method and subsequently becomes an overdetermined nonlinear equation set with boundary conditions solved by Levenberg-Marquardt method.With the profile of motional cable harness obtained from the integral of arithmetic solution,a motion simulation system based on"path"and"profile"as well as the experimental equipments is built.Using the same parameters as input for the simulation and the real cable harness correspondingly,the issue in designing,such as collision,can be easily found by the simulation system.This research obtains a better result which has no potential collisions by redesign,and the proposed method can be used as an accurate and efficient way in motional cable harness design work.