Ortho-planar linear spring

thingiverse

I've been exploring various options for printing flat spring structures and came across this concept after reading a number of articles, including Parise, J.J., Howell, L.L., and Magleby, S.P., "Ortho-Planar Linear-Motion Springs," Mechanism and Machine Theory, Vol. 36, Nos. 11-12, pp. 1281-1300, 2001. In their terminology, this spring platform is a Tri1-1S ortho-planar linear spring. As the design comes to life through multiple prints, it takes on a form of continuum robot structure, which I intend to expand upon in the future once I'm more confident in my understanding of its dynamics. This vision is influenced by the ideas presented in Qi et al within their article: P. Qi, C. Qiu, H. Liu, J. S. Dai, L. Seneviratne and K. Althoefer, "A novel continuum-style robot with multilayer compliant modules," Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Chicago, USA, 2014, pp. 3175–3180. Have fun exploring this concept and learning more about its possibilities! The Scad file for the spring platform has also been uploaded, awaiting further modifications and iterations.