• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.750-758
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• 2016

In general, a system can be stable when it is designed with a rigid material. However, the use of a rigid system can be limited, such as grasping a glass or using a small surgical instrument. To resolve this limitation, a variable stiffness mechanism was developed using a flexible material. Previous research verified the variable stiffness mechanism where flexible segments and rigid segments were connected alternately in series. However, research into the design parameters of the variable stiffness structure is needed to satisfy the desired stiffness. Therefore, a variable stiffness structure was tested by varying the design parameters to confirm the trend of the stiffness variation. When the radius of the structure becomes larger, the stiffness increases. The stiffness increased with decreasing length of the flexible segments. Under the same design parameters, the length of the flexible segments had a greater effect on the stiffness than the length of the rigid segments. In addition, the stiffness was estimated using the pseudo rigid body model and was compared with the experimental results. This parametric study can be used as a design guideline for designing the variable stiffness mechanism to satisfy the desired stiffness.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.37 no.10
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• pp.1195-1200
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• 2013

In recent years, variable stiffness actuation has attracted much attention because interaction between a robot and the environment is increasingly required for various robot tasks. Several variable stiffness actuators (VSAs) have been developed; however, they find limited applications owing to their size and weight. For realizing their widespread use, we developed a compact and lightweight mini-VSA. The mini-VSA consists of a control module based on an adjustable moment arm mechanism and a drive module with two motors. By controlling the relative motion of cams in the control module, the position and stiffness can be simultaneously controlled. Experimental results are presented to show its ability to change stiffness.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.47-53
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• 2018

Various types of robotic arms are being used for industrial purposes, particularly with the small production of multi-products, and the importance of the gripper, which can be used in industrial fields, is increasing. This study evaluated a variable stiffness mechanism gripper that can change the stiffness using the nonlinearity of a flexible material. A prototype of the gripper was fabricated and examined to confirm the change in stiffness. The previous gripper was unable to grip objects in some situations with three variable stiffness mechanism. In addition, these mechanisms were not balanced and rarely rotated when the object was gripped. Therefore, a new type of gripper was needed to solve this problem. Inspired by the movements of the human palm and Venus Flytrap, a new type of a variable stiffness soft robot hand was designed. The possibility of grasping could be increased by interlocking the palm folding mechanism by pulling the tendon attached to the variable stiffness mechanism. The soft robotic hand was used to grasp objects of various shapes and weights more stably than the previous variable stiffness mechanism gripper. This new variable stiffness soft robot hand can be used selectively depending on the application and environment to be used.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.103-110
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• 2020

Bio-inspired underwater robots have been studied to improve the dynamic performance of fins, such as swimming speed and efficiency, which is the most basic performance. Among them, bio-inspired soft robots with a compliant tail fin can have high degrees of freedom. On the other hand, to improve the driving efficiency of the compliant fins, the stiffness of the tail fin should be changed with the driving frequency. Therefore, a new type of variable stiffness mechanism has been developed and verified. This study, which was inspired by the anatomy of a real dolphin, assessed a process of designing and manufacturing a robotic dolphin with a variable stiffness mechanism. By mimicking the vertebrae of a dolphin, the variable stiffness driving part was manufactured using subtractive and additive manufacturing. A driving tendon was placed considering the location of the tendon in the actual dolphin, and the additional tendon was installed to change its stiffness. A robotic dolphin was designed and manufactured in a streamlined shape, and the swimming speed was measured by varying the stiffness. When the stiffness of the tail fin was varied at the same driving frequency, the swimming speed and thrust changed by approximately 1.24 and 1.5 times, respectively.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2009.04a
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• pp.279-282
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• 2009

본 논문에서는 행렬응축기법 및 부구조기법을 이용하여 가변형 입체 복합 공간 구조물을 효율적으로 해석할 수 있는 해석기법을 제안하였다. 최근 구조공학의 발전과 더불어 다양한 사회적 경제적 요구에 의해 가변형 입체 복합 공간 구조물에 대한 연구가 진행되고 있다. 가변형 입체 복합 공간 구조물은 많은 구조부재가 필요 하며, 부재 수가 많아짐에 따라 각 절점이 가지는 자유도수가 크게 증가하여 초기 해석 과정에서 많은 시간이 요구된다. 또한 구조물이 변경되는 경우에는 변경되는 부분의 강성의 변화에 따라 전체 구조물의 강성이 변경되므로 이에 따른 전체 구조물의 재해석 과정이 필요하다. 이러한 점에서 구조물의 자유도수를 줄여주는 행렬응축기법과 반복적인 해석과정을 줄여주는 부구조기법은 가변형 입체 복합 공간구조물을 효율적으로 해석 할 수 있는 방법이 될 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 행렬응축기법과 부구조기법을 이용하여 가변형 입체 복합 공간 구조물을 효율적으로 해석할 수 있는 해석기법을 제안하고, 이를 토대로 구체적인 알고리즘을 작성하였다. 또한 알고리즘을 구체화시켜 가변형 입체 복합 공간 구조시스템에 적합한 구조해석 프로그램을 개발하여 예제 구조물에 대하여 구조해석을 수행하였으며, 구조해석 결과를 상용프로 그램의 구조해석 결과와 비교하여 해석기법에 대한 정확성 및 효율성을 검토하였다.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.128-134
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• 2009

This paper aims to design a variable-stiffness type economical safety joint for service robots. The safety joint was designed to have a passive shock absorbing mechanism for protecting human from a catastrophic collision under service condition of robots. A simple mechanism composed of two action disks for switching the load transfer, a spring and a screw for pre-load was proposed. In order to evaluate the performance of the safety joint a testing platform which can carry out the static and impact tests was also designed and fabricated. From the test results, the designed safety joint was proved to have a variable load-carrying capacity and about 42% impact absorption capacity with simple manipulation of the control screw.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.481-494
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• 2001

An enhanced degenerated shell finite element (FE), which has been developed for inelastic analysis of reinforced concrete structures is described in this paper. Generally, Reissner-Mindlin (RM) assumptions are adopted to develop the degenerated shell FE so that transverse shear deformation effects is considered. However, it is found that there are serious defects such as locking phenomena in RM degenerated shell FE since the stiffness matrix has been overestimated in some situations. As remedies of locking phenomena, reduced integration, incompatible mode and assumed strain method have been used. Especially, the assumed strain method has been successfully used in many FEs. But contrarily, there is a few investigation on the performance of the assumed strains in the inelastic analysis of concrete structures. Therefore, shell formulation is provided in this paper with emphasis on the terms related to the stiffness matrix based on assumed strain method and microscopic concrete material model. Finally, the performance of the present shell element is tested and demonstrated with several numerical examples. From the numerical tests, the present result shows a good agreement with experimental data or other numerical results.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.32 no.12
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• pp.1049-1054
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• 2015

Nowadays, there are many researches involving structural actuators, which have adjustable stiffness; they are also called variable stiffness actuators (VSA). The VSAs can adjust the characteristics of actuators for various functions and human-machine safety. This paper describes the design and analysis of two types of VSAs. To adjust stiffness, the actuators are controlled by a principle of lever ratio mechanism, by changing a pivot position or a spring position in the structure with springs. To make the principle workable, the designs are simplified by using a ball screw system with a motor. Each structure shows different static properties with variable rates of stiffness. We have also shown the experimental verification of the dynamic performance of the two types of VSAs. This research can be applied to various industrial fields, where humans work in conjunction with robots.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.11
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• pp.739-746
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• 2013

Variability of the software product line that differentiates member products within a product line must be described with precise meaning and visualized so as easy to select. Moreover, it should be easy to manage. Variability description approaches can largely be divided into two approaches, integrated variability description approach and orthogonal variability description approach. Orthogonal Variability Description Language (OVDL) was developed for clear and precise description of variability without ambiguity. This paper validates the variability description capability of OVDL by translating the variability models of Inter-Working Function (IWF) product line described by using Orthogonal Variability Model (OVM) notations into variability descriptions in OVDL.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.349-359
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• 2001

An enhanced four-node plate element, which has been developed for explicit dynamic analysis of plate, is described in this paper. Reissner-Mind1in(RM) assumptions are adopted to consider transverse shear deformation effects in the present plate element. RM plate element produces a shear locking phenomena in thin plate so that the substitute natural strains based on assumed strain method are explicitly derived. The present plate element is applied into the explicit transient algorithm and the mass matrix of plate is formulated by using special lumping method proposed by Hinton et al. The performance of the element is verified with numerical examples.