Design of a planar hyper-redundant lockable mechanism for shape morphing using a centralized actuation method

Abstract

Abstract This work presents a type of kinematically hyper-redundant manipulators, namely serial-parallel manipulators (S-PMs), for shape morphing control. The proposed S-PMs use a centralized actuation method to significantly reduce the number of actuators. The basic design concept is to use flexible limbs to actuate a serial manipulator made of passively lockable rigid parallel manipulator (PM) modules of 3-DOFs. To implement shape morphing control, a shape parametric method is proposed to establish a relationship between a morphing shape and the DOFs of the S-PMs, based on which the kinematics of this hybrid manipulator is derived. The proposed method is applied to design and control a morphing airfoil wing with specific structure and motion requirements. The achieved results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.