IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO.

4, AUGUST 2012

987

Communication
Shape Memory Polymer-Based Flexure Stiffness Control in a Miniature Flapping-Wing Robot
Lindsey Hines, Veaceslav Arabagi, and Metin Sitti
AbstractAn active exural hinge has been developed and incorporated into the transmission of a prototype apping-wing robot. The multilayered exure, which is constructed from a shape memory polymer and a polyimide lm, showed controllable stiffness under change in temperature. At room temperature, the exure had a bending stiffness of 572 mNmm; when warmed to 70 C, the stiffness was 11 mNmm. The resulting single-wing apping system demonstrated up to an 80% change in generated lift without modication of the waveform of the main driving piezoelectric actuator. Such active stiffness tunable exure joints could be applied to any exural miniature mobile robot and device mechanisms. Index TermsFlapping ight, exural hinge, shape memory polymer (SMP).

I. INTRODUCTION With the recent emergence of miniature robots and portable motion mechanisms down to centimeter or millimeter size, bending sheet joints, compact and frictionless exures that act as rotational joints, have become indispensable and have been used in a range of applications and size scales [1][3]. As exure behavior is based on cantilever bending, the exure can be manufactured with different geometry or with various materials to achieve compliance about intended loading axes. However, these exures are typically made of passive polymer materials where the joint stiffness does not change in the small deection regime. Where weight or size constrains a system, active exural hinges can allow control without additional traditional driving actuators. In miniature apping-wing-based ying robots, where research continues on insect-scale systems [4][7], they become especially useful. If multiple wings are driven with a single piezoelectric actuator, active exures can be used in the transmission to create apping asymmetries and, therefore, control torques. The hinges can be a lightweight replacement to additional actuators used for control, increasing the system lift-to-weight ratio while maintaining controllability [8]. In this study, we propose to use shape memory polymer (SMP)coated exures as tunable stiffness joints. SMPs and shape memory alloys both fall into the category of smart materials and are capable of remembering and recovering an original shape after being deformed. In part with their shape-changing ability, SMPs also demonstrate large changes in elastic modulus when activated by external stimuli, such

Fig. 1. (a) Single-wing apping prototype with an SMP integrated active joint. The apping mechanism is mounted rigidly to a mechanical balance and a load cell for mean lift force measurement. Wing length is 20 mm. (b) Frontview photograph of the SMP and polyimide exure. (c) Side-view conceptual depiction of exure layers.

as direct heating or indirect heating including light, electric elds, and magnetic elds [9]. Because of their compact size and ease of integration, shape memory materials have found use as actuators in many miniature robotic platforms, including climbing [10], crawling [11], and rolling robots [12], as well as in miniature mechanisms, such as compact grippers [13] and devices geared toward minimally invasive surgical procedures [14][16]. Utilizing the stiffness change of a smart material directly is less common; previously, SMPs have been used to create thermally changing microstructures [17], [18] and have been incorporated into composite cantilever beams [19], [20] to allow beam stiffness change. Here, we use a composite SMP structure to allow control of hinge stiffness and induce a change in functional behavior in a miniature robot while maintaining low system weight. Our testing platform was a single-wing system using a spherical four-bar transmission mechanism to amplify the motion of a bending bimorph piezoelectric actuator. The SMP-coated exure was incorporated into one of the joints of the transmission to control the wing stroke amplitude and, thus, generated lift. II. EXPERIMENTS

Manuscript received February 2, 2012; revised April 20, 2012; accepted April 24, 2012. Date of publication May 18, 2012; date of current version August 2, 2012. This paper was recommended for publication by Associate Editor Y. Sun and Editor B. J. Nelson upon evaluation of the reviewers comments. The work of L. Hines was supported by the Department of Defense through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program. L. Hines is with the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA (e-mail: lhines@cmu.edu). V. Arabagi and M. Sitti are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA (e-mail: badeaslava@gmail.com; sitti@cmu.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TRO.2012.2197313

To fabricate the SMP integrated tunable stiffness exure, as depicted in Fig. 1(c), a layered carbon ber and polyimide lm (Kapton, Dupont) exure was rst manufactured according to the Smart Composite Microstructures methodology [4]. The Kapton serves as the exible bending sheet connecting the two surrounding rigid carbon ber layers of 60-m thickness (Torayca M60J). The Kapton bending sheet had dimensions of 3 mm (width) 0.75 mm (length) 6.5 m (thickness) and was bracketed by 2-mm-long carbon ber sections. The epoxy SMP was mixed according to the process described in [21], with equal mass ratios of EPON 826 (Hexion), Jeffamine D230 (Huntsman), and Neopentyl glycol diglycidyl ether (TCI America) used. The formulation has a glass transition temperature of 50 C, which is above

1552-3098/$31.00 2012 IEEE

988

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 4, AUGUST 2012

ambient air temperature while remaining easily producible by a heat source. The mixture was applied by hand to one side of the manufactured exure and thermally cured at 100 C for 1.5 h and postcured at 130 C for 1 h. The nal exure, which is shown in Fig. 1(b), had a 68-m layer of SMP on the Kapton bending sheet and weighed 4 mg. By creating a composite polyimide and SMP exure, the mechanical strength and life-time of the hinge are increased signicantly over the use of an only SMP-based exure, which is necessary given the desired repeated oscillatory loading. The problem of low mechanical strength of SMP materials, in general, is currently an active research topic with improvements demonstrated through both the use of various laminates [20], [22] and internal llers for reinforcement [19]. The cool and warm state bending stiffness of the exure was measured by applying an impulse and recording the response using a laser micrometer (Keyence, LS-3100) at room temperature and at approximately 70 C, above the SMP transition temperature. An extension of known weight was added to amplify motion and make the system underdamped. At room temperature, the exure had a rotational stiffness of 572 mNmm; when fully warmed, the stiffness was 11 mNmm. The exure was incorporated into a rigidly mounted single-wing apping prototype, as described in [8], with a passive wing exure of rotational stiffness 11 mNmm. This system features the leading edge of the wing driven by a bimorph piezoelectric actuator, whose motion is amplied by a spherical four-bar transmission mechanism. The trailing edge of the wing is allowed to passively rotate. The design of the piezoelectric actuator is critical to the lift generation in the apping ight system to achieve high apping amplitudes at sufcient wing apping frequencies, more details of which can be found in [4], [6], and [8]. The actuator here has a length of 18.5 mm which includes a passive rigid extension of 7.5 mm. From Laminate Plate Theory and following the work of Wood et al. [23], actuator bending stiffness is a predicted 719 N/m with a blocking force of 84 mN at 200-V input. The original Kapton transmission exure connecting the rst transmission link to the body was replaced with the SMP integrated exure, as pictured in Fig. 1(a). The system was mounted to a mechanical balance coupled to a load cell (30 g, Transducer Techniques) for measurement of average lift. Recorded lift data at 1000 Hz was sampled with a simple moving average lter with a length of 100 samples. Heat was applied to the exure through an external heating element constructed from coiled nichrome wire (40 AWG, Newtons Third Rocketry). As the temperature of the SMP itself cannot be taken directly without affecting system performance, the air temperature near the exure was measured with a thermocouple. With an input of 2 W, air temperature 1 mm from the heating element reaches 50 C in less than 5 s and a maximum temperature of approximately 110 C after 15 s. Air temperature remains below 30 C at the piezoelectric actuator. As minimizing power consumption of the mechanism is of particular importance to miniature robots and devices [24], the exure dimensions were chosen to achieve nominal rotational joint motion with no external heating applied and large deections when warmed. Once incorporated into the transmission of the apping mechanism, this allows the system to operate nominally at maximal lift with no additional power expenditure. Wing kinematics and mean lift of the test system were captured concurrently with a high-speed camera (pco.dimax) at 900 frames/s and load cell, as described previously, while the SMP exure was heated beyond its transition temperature and then allowed to cool. The camera captured the system from its top view and was able to capture both the wing apping angle (axis R1 in Fig. 1) and the wing rotation angle (axis R2 in Fig. 1). Wing kinematics were measured with point tracking in postprocessing. Power of 2 W was applied to the resistance heater, while the piezoelectric actuator was driven with a sinusoid

(a) 120
100 Angle (deg) 80 60 40 20 0

Flapping Angle Rotation Angle (+) Rotation Angle ()

(b)

Lift (mN)

0.5

0.5

10

15 20 25 Time (sec)

30

35

Fig. 2. (a) Wing peak-to-peak apping angles and maximum rotation angles, and (b) lift of the prototype single-wing apping mechanism over time with warmed and cooled SMP integrated exure. The system was driven at 36 Hz and 200-V peak-to-peak with 2 W inputted to the heating element at times indicated with the red shaded area. Raw and ltered lift data are colored gray and black, respectively. Rotation angles are indicated with (+) and () for positive and negative wing rotation about the nominal position since rotation was not symmetric.

of 36 Hz and 200-V peak-to-peak amplitude. Fig. 2 shows the system wing apping and rotation angles with changing lift over time. With the described heating element, the system transitioned from a maximum lift of 0.52 mN to minimum lift of 0.1 mN in 3.5 s, a loss of 80%. Wing apping angle decreased signicantly, being 80 peak-to-peak when cool and dropping to 50 peak-to-peak when warmed (see video online [25]). The decrease in lift is caused by a combination of decrease in system resonant frequency and transmission displacement loss because of the heated, highly deformable exure. With the cool SMP exure, the maximum lift of 0.52 mN peaks at 36 Hz. When the exure is heated, maximum lift is 0.25 mN and occurs at 28 Hz. Holding the driving frequency of the system constant accentuates the lift change. In Fig. 3(b), images 1 and 2 depict exure behavior while both cool and warm. In both 1 and 2, a side view of the system and SMP exure is illustrated, in which two images of maximum exure deformation are superimposed. While cool, the exure operates as a typical, albeit stiff, rotational exure, leaving the transmission to function as originally designed. When heated, the exure deforms signicantly and allows translational motion between the xed base and rst transmission link, resulting in a loss of apping amplitude. To produce maximal lift, ideally, the transmission links would function as perfect rotational joints with no stiffness, resulting in amplication of actuator motion without loss. Although the described cool SMP exure is signicantly stiffer than normal Kapton only exures, the chosen transmission joint experiences only minimal rotational motion, minimizing the effect of additional exure stiffness. Indeed, with a replaced passive Kapton only exure at the rst transmission link, maximum lift was 0.46 mN and occurred at 36 Hz. The small difference

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 4, AUGUST 2012

989

(a)
0.6 0.5 Lift (mN) 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 20

Heating

Cooling
40 60 80 Air Temperature (C)

(b)

Side View
1st Transmission Link Heating Element

SMP Transmission Flexure

tical use in control of a miniature apping-wing-based ying robot. Currently, the fastest demonstrated change in lift is 0.12 mN/s, which may or may not be sufcient considering current apping-wing controllers rely upon a per-wing stroke update frequency. The time lag for the exure stiffness change, which is caused by the time to warm from room temperature, can be minimized with closed-loop temperature control. Time to cool can be improved by using an SMP with a higher glass transition temperature, creating a larger gradient between SMP and room temperature. Although the presented controllable exure design relies on non pin joint behavior of a rotational exure in its warm state, it is possible to use the same basic strategy to create a controllable purely rotational joint. With modied exure dimensions, higher aspect ratios, and thinner SMP coatings, the exure can be constrained to rotational motion, while still allowing changes in stiffness. Designers, however, should be wary of fatigue failure under cyclic loading. Frequent exure failure was observed when the active exure was incorporated into joints with higher angular displacements (up to 100 ), such as the wing rotational exure or the nal transmission link, which directly drives the wing stroke angle. With large deformations, failure would occur after 5 s of operation or 200 cycles. Placement on a transmission joint with low required angular displacements eliminated this problem.

Side View

IV. CONCLUSION In this study, we have demonstrated an SMP-integrated exure with tunable stiffness incorporated into a single-wing apping-based ying robot prototype. The exure allows lift change without modication of the piezoelectric actuator driving waveform, opening the possibility for wing force asymmetry without additional piezoelectric actuators in multiwing systems. As a future work, heating elements will be embedded into or close to the exures to decrease power consumption and to decrease the stiffness change response time for higher bandwidth motion control. Such active stiffness tunable exure joints could be applied to any exural miniature mobile robot and device mechanisms.

Fig. 3. (a) System lift change versus temperature for SMP integrated exure heating and cooling. Each data point represents at least 15 s of captured data. (b) Photographs 1 and 2 depict side views of the SMP exure when fully cooled and fully warmed, respectively. Two images are superimposed at the time of maximum exure deformation with white dotted lines marking the position of the rst transmission link.

in maximum lift can be attributed to transmission misalignment which can occur when completely removing and replacing joints. Overall system lift is lower than what was seen in [8] due to the repaired passive wing exure which is stiffer than optimal and asymmetrically rotates, as seen in Fig. 2; resonance and apping amplitude between systems is comparable. To ensure that the exure stiffness tuning is precisely controllable, system lift was recorded with discrete steps in the inputed power into the resistance heater. Fig. 3(a) depicts change in lift with change in air temperature. Each input power was held constant at least 15 s to ensure that both the temperature and lift stabilized. While transitioning, change in lift is almost linear with temperature, with little hysteresis. Such a result demonstrates that any lift value between the fully cooled or heated state could be maintained with closed-loop temperature control. III. DISCUSSION While the current SMP exure is heated with an external resistance heater, internal heating is possible, although with increased manufacturing complexity. The current heater uses a little under 2 W of power to induce a full transition of the exure; embedding nichrome wire into the SMP exure layer would result in a more compact system and signicantly reduce power expenditure necessary for a stiffness change. A single embedded wire along the edge of the exible exure sheet should not increase exure stiffness signicantly and allow faster SMP heating. Transition speed is the predominate concern for prac-

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the members of the NanoRobotics Laboratory for all their support and suggestions.

REFERENCES
[1] N. Lobontiu, Compliant Mechanisms: Design of Flexure Hinges. Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2002. [2] S. Zelenika, M. G. Munteanu, and F. D. Bona, Optimized exural hinge shapes for microsystems and high-precision applications, Mech. Mach. Theory, vol. 44, pp. 18261839, 2009. [3] J. P. Whitney and R. J. Wood, Aeromechanics of passive rotation in apping ight, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 660, pp. 197220, 2010. [4] R. J. Wood, The rst takeoff of a biologically inspired at-scale robotic insect, IEEE Trans. Robot., vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 341347, Apr. 2008. [5] B. M. Finio and R. J. Wood, Distributed power and control actuation in the thoracic mechanics of a robotic insect, J. Bioinspirat. Biomimet., vol. 5, p. 045006, 2010. [6] M. Sitti, Piezoelectrically actuated four-bar mechanism with two exible links for micromechanical ying insect thorax, IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatronics, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 2636, Mar. 2003. [7] X. Deng, L. Schenato, and S. Sastry, Flapping ight for biomimetic robotic insects Part II: Flight control design, IEEE Trans. Robot., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 789803, Aug. 2006. [8] V. Arabagi, L. Hines, and M. Sitti, Design and manufacturing of a controllable miniature apping wing robotic platform, Int. J. Robot. Res., vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 785800, May 1, 2012.

990

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 4, AUGUST 2012

[9] P. T. Mather, X. Luo, and I. A. Rousseau, Shape memory polymer research, Annu. Rev. Mater. Res., vol. 39, pp. 445471, 2009. [10] J. Koh, S. An, and K. Cho, Finger-sized climbing robot using articial proleg, in Proc. Int. Conf. Biomed. Robot. Biomechatron., Tokyo, Japan, 2010, pp. 610615. [11] B. Kim, M. G. Lee, Y. P. Lee, Y. Kim, and G. Lee, An earthworm-like micro robot using shape memory alloy actuator, Sens. Actuat. A: Phys., vol. 125, no. 2, pp. 429437, 2006. [12] Q. Chang-jun, M. Pei-sun, and Y. Qin, A prototype micro-wheeled-robot using SMA actuator, Sens. Actuat. A: Phys., vol. 113, no. 1, pp. 9499, 2004. [13] Z. W. Zhong and C. K. Yeong, Development of a gripper using SMA wire, Sens. Actuat. A: Phys., vol. 126, no. 2, pp. 375381, 2006. [14] V. R. C. Kode and M. C. Cavusoglu, Design and characterization of a novel hybrid actuator using shape memory alloy and DC micromotor for minimally invasive surgery applications, IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatronics, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 455464, Aug. 2007. [15] H. M. Wache, D. J. Tartakoska, A. Hentrich, and M. H. Wagner, Development of a polymer stent with shape memory effect as a drug delivery system, J. Mater. Sci.: Mater. Med., vol. 14, pp. 109112, 2003. [16] W. G. Bae, J. H. Choi, S. H. Lee, D. Kang, K. W. Jung, and K. Y. Suh, Centering mechanism for micro vessel robot using micropatterned shape memory polymers, in Proc. Int. Conf. Biomed. Robot. Biomechatron., Tokyo, Japan, 2010, pp. 594598.

[17] S. Kim, M. Sitti, T. Xie, and X. Xiao, Reversible dry adhesives with thermally controllable adhesion, Soft Matter, vol. 5, pp. 36893693, 2009. [18] E. Manias, J. Chen, N. Fang, and X. Zhang, Polymeric micromechanical components with tunable stiffness, Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 79, pp. 1700 1702, 2001. [19] Y. Liu, K. Gall, M. L. Dunn, and P. McCluskey, Thermomechanics of shape memory polymer nanocomposites, Mech. Mater., vol. 36, no. 10, pp. 929940, 2004. [20] C. Zhang and Q. Ni, Bending behavior of shape memory polymer based laminates, Composite Struct., vol. 78, no. 2, pp. 153161, 2007. [21] T. Xie and I. A. Rousseau, Facile tailoring of thermal transition temperatures of epoxy shape memory polymers, Polymer, vol. 50, no. 8, pp. 18521856, 2009. [22] Z. Li and Z. Wang, Characterization of the exural behavior of SMP sandwich beam, Adv. Mater. Res., vol. 123125, pp. 939942, 2010. [23] R. J. Wood, E. Steltz, and R. S. Fearing, Optimal energy density piezoelectric bending actuators, Sens. Actuat. A: Phys., vol. 119, no. 2, pp. 476488, 2005. [24] M. Sitti, Miniature devices: Voyage of the microrobots, Nature, vol. 458, pp. 11211122, 2009. [25] (2012). [Online]. Available: http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/Flapping Robot/