Investigation of a stiffness varying mechanism for flexible robotic system

With the advent of automation and robotic systems, robotic manipulators are becoming increasingly popular in various industries. This project aims to investigate stiffness varying technology for a class of flexible manipulators with the aim of online changing manipulator stiffness. We propose and develop a stiffness varying mechanism based on Polycaprolactone (PCL), characterize it and test out together with extensive experiments. This mainly involves design improvement, modeling, characterization and hands-on experiments.