Development of a reconfigurable compliant education kit for undergraduate mechanical engineering education

In the curriculum of mechanism design, degree of freedom (DOF) is by far one of the most important issues, but it is not easy to whether impart from teachers or learn for students, especially it needs strong space imagination to determine the freedoms and constraints. To make this teaching or learning more convenient, an education kit is no doubt helpful to understand the complicated concept and theory via demonstration or DIY. For this purpose, a design philosophy for a reconfigurable compliant education kit is proposed, and a prototype is provided correspondingly. In fact, this education kit can be assembled into a variety of different parallel flexure mechanisms, which can be derived by Blanding's rule. The education kit shows its advantages in the following applications: (1) demonstrate the complementary rule of freedom and constraint proposed by Maxwell; (2) identify the redundant constraints; (3) analyze degree of freedom in both a qualitative and quantitative way; (4) develop the design of a specific compliant mechanism with multiple topologies.