Compliant Strandbeest
This just shows the peak PE point from all starting angles.
Compliant Strandbeest
2014
The novelty of Theo Jansen's Strandbeest, a kinematic mechanism designed to walk like a beast, has caused it to become very popular. One medium for its popularity is the many 3D printing and solid model sharing sites and communities on the internet. However, those who wish to print, assemble, and use one of the many Strandbeest models available may become frustrated by the many parts (70+) to print and alter in order to have a working model. The purpose of this project was to develop a compliant Strandbeest. My team further agreed that it would be beneficial to create a 3D printable design. This would greatly reduce the part count and thus, the assembly time and the need to modify parts.
Our team has successfully created a design for the dual-leg and transmission systems which consists of only a handful of parts including two legs, two transmission modules, and four clips. One of the keys to this project was my discovery of how much of a difference could be made in the stiffness and stress in the system by changing the configuration (initial angles) in which the leg system was printed. Using the theory of virtual work, I wrote a program in MatLab to analyze the stiffness of the system at each starting angle. Plots from these analyses can be seen in the slideshow above.