Design and Construction of a Discretely Actuated Hyper-redundant Manipulator

In this paper, the design and construction of a new binary pneumatic actuated hyper-redundant manipulator is presented. The discretely actuated hyper-redundant manipulators have advantages such as wide workspace, the ability of obstacle avoidance and simple control. Despite of these advantages, few prototypes have been made so far, which each of them has some defects. These defects are small movement range, fairly high cost, and accelerated and impulsive motion. To solve these problems, the 3-revolute prismatic spherical parallel mechanisms (3-RPS) are used as modules in this paper. So the cost is reduced due to the lower number of legs. Also, the motion range has been increased by replacing the spherical joints with universal joints. The movements of the manipulator have been effectively more uniform and softer by using flow control valves on cylinders. Finally, several tests are conducted to determine how the manipulator moves and the results are presented.