Design and Fabrication of a Partially Statically Balanced Scissor Linkage Made of Bamboo Pieces

摘要

This paper investigates the prospects of making linkages made of bamboo pieces for realistic use by taking popular scissor lift as a test case. The paper through prototyping shows that because of weakness in revolute joints formed on bamboo pieces, the popularly used parallel-plane scissor linkage leads to excessive lateral sway. The paper further shows that the lateral sway can be significantly reduced be merely changing the linkage design to triangular-prism-shaped scissor linkage. The paper also formulates an optimization problem where the objective is minimization of actuation effort of scissor lift and optimization parameters are the free-lengths of the springs that are used to partially statically balance the gravity potential energy of the scissor lift. We chose to use normal nonzero-free-length springs instead of wellstudied zero-free-length springs since it is less cumbersome and easy to assemble. We could practically demonstrate a 60% reduction in actuation effort. While simple, (1) recognition of advantages of triangular-prism-shaped scissor linkage in the context of making linkages with bamboo and (2) the spring parametrization and manual optimization in the context of static balancing are novel.