MOTION PLATFORM

I designed this to give researchers at the RAM lab a way to manipulate a treadmill in multiple axes without purchasing an expensive system (there are only a few commercially available solutions, and they are 5-6 figures).

Professor Yi told me we had the linear motors lying around in the lab, unused for nearly a decade, so I designed the system around converting the linear motors' sliding into useful rotation of the platform.

After iterating through different ideas for joint configuration, I had to verify that the linear -> rotational motion mechanism (essentially an offset crank-slider) could transmit the required torque in both axes at any point in the workspace.

I made a Python sim to do it, as you can see above. However, I couldn't figure out the crank/slider/offset link lengths that could satisfy the torque requirements while adjusting them myself, so I also wrote an optimizer which determines the shortest possible link and offset lengths that could generate the required torque at every possible position.

After validating the design, I did parts selection/CAD design, prototypes/iteration, and eventually assembly/testing. It is now being used for research in the lab. The project took around one semester.