For the master course ‘design principles for precision mechanisms’, a flexural pivot was designed instead of a ball-joint because this has no friction and thus leads to a more predictable behavior. A prototype was made by printing the BFPs and gluing them together so the print direction could be chosen more favourably.
A parallelogram construction of 1/3rd for a delta robot.
Four parameters for the BFPs are optimized to acquire a high as possible rotational vs lateral stiffness ratio (the rotational stiffness needs to be as low as possible). In the last picture the parameters can be seen, H, h, alpha and theta are the variables that were optimized.
the optimized parameters for the BFP
The final prototype, using 24 BFPs, shows the working principle.
