Design of Translational Bistable Compliant Mechanisms for Tactile Braille Dots

Abstract

The arrays of tactile pins, as the lines of Braille cells and graphics, enable the accessibility of visually impaired, blind, and deafblind people to the acquisition of information and its communication. The pins of these arrays have two states, the depressed and the raised state in which they must remain firm during the "tactile reading.achieved through the user’s fingers. In previous works the authors presented a bistable mechanism to actuate a Braille pin based on beams. The bistability avoids the need for a locking mechanism, since it is retained with the same flexible structure. In this work, new alternatives of bistable mechanisms based on corrugated tubular materials are presented with emphasis on achieving compactness with respect to beam-based designs. Analytical calculations and simulations of preliminary results of corrugated bistable mechanisms with very simple parameterization obtained by two angular coordinates and a diameter are presented.