iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my appreciation to those who supported me through my thesis research. First I would like to thank Dr. Kok-Meng Lee for giving me an opportunity to participate in this project. His inspiring advices and constant encouragement have so much influence on the accomplishment of my Ph. D. thesis. The most important thing that I learned from him is his philos...

Synthesis of shape morphing compliant mechanism is inherently different from typical single output problems, due to the multiple output points along the morphing boundary. Two synthesis approaches, using a fixed initial discretization mesh and using a load path representation, have been developed previously to simultaneously address the topology, size, and geometry aspects of a compliant mechan...

In the context of structural optimization, we propose two natural extensions of the level set method for the design of compliant mechanisms. Two new objective functions are introduced, well suited to the automatic design of compliant mechanisms, and a strategy for the design of mechanisms adapted to multiple loads is proposed. This work is illustrated with several numericals examples. RÉSUMÉ. D...

A b s t r a c t A procedure for the topology design of compliant mechanisms with multiple output requirements is presented. Two methods for handling the multiple output requirements are developed, a combined virtual load method and a weighted sum of objectives method. The problem formulations and numerical solution procedures are discussed and illustrated by design examples. The examples illust...

While traditional robotics provides solutions to many problems involving human-robot interaction, there is one large and critical area in which traditional robotics has fallen short: the combination of affordable and portable robotic systems with sufficient performance is currently an unsolved problem in robotics [1]. Most robots that physically interact with humans are heavy and expensive, sev...

While in conventional mechanical bearings motion is obtained by sliding or rolling between solid bodies with the resulting mechanical non-linearities, flexible bearings rely on the elastic properties of matter allowing several advantages to be obtained. Combining flexible bearings with adequate actuators and sensors allows thus nanometric positioning resolutions to be obtained. In this paper, t...

In high precision equipment the use of compliant mechanisms is favourable as elastic joints offer the advantages of low friction and no backlash. To satisfy exact constraint design the mechanism should have exactly the required degrees of freedom and constraints so that the system is kinematically and statically determinate. For this purpose we propose the following kinematic analysis using a f...

Best eeort traac in the Internet is managed by end to end congestion control mechanisms whose limitations are known. The continuous Internet growth leads to more and more applications that don't \play the rules" of the end-to-end congestion control scheme. Simple mechanisms inside the routers, refered as random early detection (RED), provide a more eecient congestion control. It can also be use...

The objective of this research is to develop an immersive interface and a design algorithm to facilitate the synthesis of compliant mechanisms from a user-centered design perspective. Compliant mechanisms are mechanical devices which produce motion or force through deflection or flexibility of their parts. Using the constraint-based method of design, the design process relies on the designer to...

In chapter 3, the compliant mechanism has been designed by topology optimization with rectangular geometry as the basic geometry. In chapter 4, the work has been extended to taper and hexogonal basic geometries. In these studies, for the given input conditions, maximizing the GA and MA have been kept as the objectives. However, in many real life application, we need to obtain a specified output...