Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2014
In this paper we present the design of a compact active cardiac stabilizer based onplanar compliant mechanisms and piezoelectric actuators. Considering an assembly of planarmanufactured structures helps to simplify the manufacturing process and may increase thecompactness. Parallel architectures constitute interesting solutions for their intrinsicstiffness properties, but in a planar configuration parallel manipulators often exhibitkinematic singularities. Two design approaches for planar parallel compliant mechanismsare presented in this paper. One design approach consists in designing a passive compliantmechanism in a configuration close to the singularity by introducing some asymmetriesduring the manufacturing process. The second design approach consists in taking advantageof the singularities of parallel manipulators to obtain non-trivial solutions. The newproposed active stabilizer, composed of planar compliant mechanisms, is introduced and itsperformances are discussed.