Distributed-Actuation Mechanism for a Finger-Type Manipulator: Theory and Experiments

In this paper, a distributed-actuation method has been newly proposed based on a simple sliding-actuation mechanism for a finger-type manipulator design. Based on the spatially distributed force on the proposed sliding-actuation mechanism, it has been shown that the distributed actuation provides additional design freedom to optimize the manipulator performance. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we developed a finger-type manipulator, which consists of four links with three joints, and performed experiments. The experimental results show that the fingertip force of the developed manipulator can be effectively increased and easily managed by the distributed-actuation method.