As mechanisms become increasingly precise, so becomes the reduction of noise and vibration increasingly important. One method for eliminating vibrations in mechanisms is dynamic balancing. This method prevents vibrations from occurring by designing the mechanism such that the inertial forces and moments of all bodies in the mechanism cancel each other out kinematically. Generally, this is done by cleverly adding masses to existing mechanisms or by using symmetric mechanisms which move in opposite directions. Another method for the synthesis of mechanisms is topology optimization. This method can be used to design dynamically balanced mechanisms without the need for symmetry or redundant masses.

An algorithm is developed, based on the 99-line code, to synthesize such dynamically balanced mechanisms. As a test case, an off-centered (thereby usually unbalanced) force-inverter is designed, and a significant reduction in the shaking forces and shaking moments is achieved. The resulting geometries are analyzed in COMSOL to verify the results of the algorithm and perform further analyses on the performance of the algorithm.

This research proposes and validates a novel grasping principle to be able to set caging grasps in cluttered environments. A prototype is designed making use of manoeuvering fingers which propagate along the object surface and are covered with everting belts to minimize slip and thus friction forces on the object and environment. Using several lab setups, it is shown that the designed gripper fingers closely follow spherical objects, and do so while exerting only negligible normal and friction forces on the object or surrounding clutter. Furthermore, the gripper is validated with a robotic system in a practical test case of grasping tomatoes from a dense cluttered pile. The gripper successfully grasped 100% of the objects without any control effort in terms of clutter avoidance and grasp pose control. This shows that this novel strategy for setting a caging grasp makes grasping difficult objects in cluttered environments robust and highly successful.

This thesis presents a transformable metamaterial, inspired by origami. Generally, metamaterials are build up following the periodicity of Bravais lattices. This study aims to design a structure not following the Bravais lattices, but rather a different type of symmetry which tiles a sphere, in order to expand on current design studies. In this report the different types of spherical symmetries are discussed and the icosahedral symmetry group is used to design a theorical model. Then a prototype is designed and 3D-printed. Lastly the prototype is discussed and recommendations for further research are made.

Singularity points are causing problems in motion converters. A solution is found and experimentally validated.