Elastostatic Modelling of a Wooden Parallel Robot

Eco-design of industrial robots is a field of research which has been rarely explored in the past. In order to considerably decrease the environmental impact of robot during the design phase, metal or carbon composite parts can be replaced by bio-sourced materials, such as wood. Indeed, wood has interesting mechanical properties, but its performance/dimensions will vary with the atmospheric conditions/external solicitations and with the conditions in which trees have grown. In order to be able to design a stiff industrial robot, robust design approaches must be used. These approaches must be fed with elastostatic models that are able to predict the variability in the robot deformations due to the variability of the wood mechanical properties.