Design and Analysis of a New Cable-Driven Hyper Redundant Manipulator

Hyper-redundant manipulators have been widely used in many fields, however many existing hyper redundant manipulators actuated directly by motors have the disadvantages of complicate structure and high cost. This paper proposes a novel remote cable-driven hyper redundant manipulator. This manipulator is based on elephant trunk bionics, and composed of several serial links combined by Hook joints. Each link is pulled by two antagonized pairs of cables. Two antagonized pairs belonged to the same link are tied and driven by only one motor, which can reduced largely the number of step motors needed. This paper fully discusses the structure and analyzes the cable stretching and retracting displacement. Analysis and motion simulation results show that the proposed scheme is practical and effective.