Design and development of a flexible-rigid Triglide sorting manipulator

Flexible manipulators have been widely applied in various tasks involving grasping and manipulation, and their unique characteristics in terms of lightweight design and adaptability make them particularly suitable for tackling complex spatial pick-and-place operations. In this work, a Triglide flexible manipulator is presented and developed, based on the parallel Biglide mechanism and dual leaf springs in parallelogram structure, which features adjustable stiffness by changing the transverse configuration of the leaf springs. To analyze the deflections of the leaf springs efficiently, a segmented approach is deployed, to calculate large deflection within the plane of the leaf-springs parallelogram structure. The adopted approach uses classical bending deformation formulas from mechanics of materials. Consequently, the static models of the manipulator are derived for analyzing bending deformation and workspace by means of numerical calculations. Finite element analysis is adopted to investigate the mechanical characteristics of the manipulator. A prototype of the variable stiffness manipulator is built, and an experimental setup is established for static testing. The obtained results align with the previously observed mechanical characteristics. The main advantages of the flexible robotic manipulator lie in its simple structure, small footprint, and simple kinematic model for control.