The progression of robotics technology in nowadays is in leaps and boundaries, where the robots are getting smaller and intelligent than ever before!

Since the size of a robot has significantly decreased, the ratio of its surface area to its volume increased. When the robots get smaller, friction in their moving parts can become a major source of energy loss.

Hence, it’s a biggest challenge to build a smaller, lighter yet faster moving robot. Guys, let’s meet the small yet robust robot, “Prototyping Folded Robots”.

To be honest, even with the SCM process, those very small robots can still be difficult to design or build. In order to avoid the costly errors in the early stages of design, you have to create a scaled analog to the SCM process using commonly available materials. By simply performing the scaled process, it enables you to go from a design on paper to a functional scaled prototype in within 20 minutes or shorter! ‘

By the way, you’ll need the following components to build the prototyping folded robot:

• Laser cutter,

• Posterboard,

• Glue stick or hot mount adhesive,

• Polyester film,

• 2D CAD software (It can be Solidworks or CorelDraw).

In this project, you have to draw or sketch the two dimensional drawing. Then, cutting the flexures, insert the flexure layer and laminate the parts. After it, you must cut the outlines, releasing the parts and pre-folding linkages.

Lastly, it’s time to assemble all the parts into one piece. Ta Da, now you have the prototyping folded robot! Hopefully, you’ll have some serious fun with it. [berkeley]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 9:03 am and is filed under Robotics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.