Robot Design Method Using 3D Printed Inner Crystal Structure

Abstract

Robots that have intimate contacts with people such as communication robots and care assistant robots are used widely in recent years. Appearances of such robots are important to encourage use of the robots and to extract desirable reaction from people. Also, each demand for such robots contains minor differences and each robot for the demand is designed one by one. However, designing robot spends long time and each demand would be changing every day. For these reasons, designing robots needs much more speed and capability of realizing desired appearance. In this paper, for automatic robot designing with arbitrary shape and functions by a computer, a uniform method to simplify robot designing by 3D printed inner structure is proposed. Robot designing is converted into optimization problem of allocating components by proposed method and becomes suitable for a computer to deal with. Desired shape is also maintained while needed functions are equipped by this method. Effects of proposed method is confirmed through shape comparison experiment.