Flexure Design Rules for Carbon Fiber Microrobotic Mechanisms

Mechanisms utilizing rigid links and relatively small flexural joints are very suitable for fabrication at the meso scale. The Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI) project at UC Berkeley has developed a simple fabrication method which works very well at the scale where the links are a few millimeters in length and the flexures are few hundred microns in length. Previous analysis has concentrated on the geometry of the composite material links for creating rigid links. Recently, we have found that for useful performance, detailed analysis is required of the flexures also. This paper presents a brief analysis of the issues involved in the design of the flexural components of such mechanisms.