A Three-Dimensional Printed, Nonassembly, Passive Dynamic Walking Toy: Design and Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we present the redesign and analysis of a century old walking toy. Historically, the toy is made up of two wooden pieces including a rear leg and a front leg and body (as a single piece) that are attached to each other by means of a pin joint. When the toy is placed on a ramp and given a slight perturbation, it ambles downhill powered only by gravity. Before the toy can walk successfully, it needs careful tuning of its geometry and mass distribution. The traditional technique of manual wood carving offers very limited flexibility to tune the mass distribution and geometry. We have re-engineered the toy to be three-dimensional (3D) printed as a single integrated assembly that includes a pin joint and the two legs. After 3D printing, we have to manually break-off the weakly held support material to allow movement of the pin joint. It took us 6 iterations to progressively tune the leg geometry, mass distribution, and hinge joint tolerances to create our most successful working prototype. The final 3D printed toy needs minimal postprocessing and walks reliably on a 7.87 deg downhill ramp. Next, we created a computer model of the toy to explain its motion and stability. Parameter studies reveal that the toy exhibits stable walking motion for a fairly wide range of mass distributions. Although 3D printing has been used to create nonassembly articulated kinematic mechanisms, this is the first study that shows that it is possible to create dynamics-based nonassembly mechanisms such as walking toys.