Rapidly Prototyping Robots: Using Plates and Reinforced Flexures

In this article, we present plate and reinforced flexure (PARF) fabrication, an inexpensive, rapid fabrication technique for robot mechanisms inspired by the smart composite manufacturing (SCM) used in VelociRoACH and RoboBee designs. PARF extends SCM to larger sizes at low costs. We used PARF to develop a meter-scale hexapedal robot, BigANT, a design we made publicly available. Manufacture of BigANT requires minimal tooling-foam board, tape, a saw blade, and a knife; the chassis costs <; US$20 in materials, encouraging its use in research, education, and recreation. We present a study of PARF joints, showing several variations spanning a range of fabrication effort and mechanical properties. PARF promises the possibility of quickly and inexpensively building robot mechanisms for tasks as the requirements arise, rather than relying on prefabricated robot bodies.