Minimally Actuated Serial Robot
This addresses the challenge of reducing actuation complexity in robotics, potentially lowering costs and increasing flexibility, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing serial robot concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving complex motions in serial robots with fewer actuators by proposing a novel design where movable actuators travel over links to adjust passive joints, enabling wide-ranging motions similar to hyper-redundant robots. It demonstrates capabilities through simulated obstacle avoidance and an experimental robot maneuvering in confined spaces.
In this paper, we propose a novel type of serial robot with minimal actuation. The robot is a serial rigid structure consisting of multiple links connected by passive joints and of movable actuators. The novelty of this robot is that the actuators travel over the links to a given joint and adjust the relative angle between the two adjacent links. The joints passively preserve their angles until one of the actuators moves them again. This actuation can be applied to any serial robot with two or more links. This unique configuration enables the robot to undergo the same wide range of motions typically associated with hyper-redundant robots but with much fewer actuators. The robot is modular and its size and geometry can be easily changed. We describe the robot's mechanical design and kinematics in detail and demonstrate its capabilities for obstacle avoidance with some simulated examples. In addition, we show how an experimental robot fitted with a single mobile actuator can maneuver through a confined space to reach its target.