Kinematic Modeling of Scissor-Mechanism-Based Curvilinear Actuator

Conventional electric motors usually provide rotary or linear motions to actuate mechatronic systems. In order to accomplish complex tasks, many research studies have been conducted to develop intelligent actuation mechanisms capable of converting simple input motions into complex target motions. In this paper, we propose a novel type of curvilinear actuator to achieve non-linear output motions, which is based on a scissor mechanism with off-centered link position in each unit. A kinematic modeling framework is also presented to compute the motion trajectories of the proposed scissor-mechanism-based curvilinear actuators (SMCA). Simulation results have demonstrated that, by changing the link position of each scissor unit, the created SMCA can achieve different types of output curves and poses.