PhD student and ME faculty member earn ASME's Compliant Mechanism Theory Best Paper Award

Venkatasubramanian Kalpathy Venkiteswaran, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, has won the ASME Design Engineering Division Mechanisms and Robotics Committee's Compliant Mechanism Theory Best Paper Award. The honor was announced at the 2014 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, August 18-20, Buffalo, NY.  Co-author for the paper is Venkiteswaran's advisor Assistant Professor Haijun Su.

The first-place paper is titled, "Development of a 3-Spring Pseudo Rigid Body Model of Compliant Joints for Robotic Applications.” Research for the paper is the result of a project supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and National Science Foundation. The paper describes the development of a 3-spring pseudo-rigid-body model for 2D beams that are often used in compliant joints in robots. The kinematic parameters of the reduced model are optimization by minimizing errors in comparison with the Timoshenko beam theory. This model provides a much simpler and faster approach for the analysis of compliant robotic mechanisms.