Design of a compensation mechanism for an active cardiac stabilizer based on an assembly of planar compliant mechanisms

Abstract

In this paper we present the design of a compact active cardiac stabilizer based on planar compliant mechanisms and piezoelectric actuators. Considering an assembly of planar manufactured structures helps to simplify the manufacturing process and may increase the compactness. Parallel architectures constitute interesting solutions for their intrinsic stiffness properties, but in a planar configuration parallel manipulators often exhibit kinematic singularities. Two design approaches for planar parallel compliant mechanisms are presented in this paper. One design approach consists in designing a passive compliant mechanism in a configuration close to the singularity by introducing some asymmetries during the manufacturing process. The second design approach consists in taking advantage of the singularities of parallel manipulators to obtain non-trivial solutions. The new proposed active stabilizer, composed of planar compliant mechanisms, is introduced and its performances are discussed. © 2014 AFM, EDP Sciences.