Design and Control of Under-Actuated Tendon-Driven Robotic Finger and Hyper-Redundant Robot

Abstract

We present design and control of under-actuated tendon-driven (UATD) robotic finger and hyper-redundant robot. We first introduce a recently-developed design optimization framework for the UATD robotic systems based on the stiffness decomposition. We apply this design framework to the UATD robotic finger and the UATD hyper-redundant robot with considering physical constraints for their implementation, after obtaining their motion data from motion capture and vision-based motion analysis. Actuated space motion controller is designed for generating the free motion along actuated space considering the deformation in the un-actuated space and the friction of tendons. Simulation and experiment are also performed to verify their optimized design and the developed controller with tension-controlled, bi-directional actuation module.