Computational Design of Statically Balanced Planar Spring Mechanisms

Statically balanced spring mechanisms are used in many applications that support our daily lives. However, creating new designs is a challenging problem since the designer has to simultaneously determine the right number of springs, their connectivity, attachment points, and other parameters. We propose a novel optimization-driven approach for designing statically balanced mechanisms in an interactive, semi-automatic way. In particular, we describe an efficient method for design optimization based on the principle of constant potential energy, an automated sparsification method for spring topology design, and a null-space exploration scheme that enables user to navigate the local space of design alternatives. We demonstrate our design system on a set of simulation examples and several manufactured prototypes.