MS Mechanical Sciences MS Mech. Sci. 2191-916X Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/ms-2-99-2011 Concept of modular flexure-based mechanisms for ultra-high precision robot design Richard M. 1 Clavel R. 1 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratoire de Systèmes Robotiques (LSRO), Station 9, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland 10 05 2011 2 1 99 107 Copyright: © 2011 M. Richard 2011 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://ms.copernicus.org/articles/2/99/2011/ms-2-99-2011.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://ms.copernicus.org/articles/2/99/2011/ms-2-99-2011.pdf

This paper introduces a new concept of modular flexure-based mechanisms to design industrial ultra-high precision robots, which aims at significantly reducing both the complexity of their design and their development time. This modular concept can be considered as a robotic Lego, where a finite number of building bricks is used to quickly build a high-precision robot. The core of the concept is the transformation of a 3-D design problem into several 2-D ones, which are simpler and well-mastered. This paper will first briefly present the theoretical bases of this methodology and the requirements of both types of building bricks: the active and the passive bricks. The section dedicated to the design of the active bricks will detail the current research directions, mainly the maximisation of the strokes and the development of an actuation sub-brick. As for the passive bricks, some examples will be presented, and a discussion regarding the establishment of a mechanical solution catalogue will conclude the section. Last, this modular concept will be illustrated with a practical example, consisting in the design of a 5-degree of freedom ultra-high precision robot.

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