• Byungchul Kim, Useok Jeong, Kyu-Jin Cho, “Analysis and Design of Dual Tendon Routing for the Under-actuated Tendon-Driven Robotic Systems”, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, submitted.

*Only limited contents are included in this page because the research has not yet been published. This page will be updated later.

Definition of the under-actuation mechanism

Under-actuation mechanism, mechanisms that use fewer actuators than the system’s degree of freedoms (DoFs),

provides advantages. It simplifies the robot design because we can design the robot with fewer actuators. Further,

The number of actuators is one of main reason impacting the robot system’s complexity. Researchers have tried to

use less number of actuators than the robot actual degree of freedoms (DoF); these robots and mechanism were named as under-actuated robots and under-actuation mechanism, respectively.

Wearable robot with tendon-driven under-actuation mechanism

Interestingly, the use of under-actuation not only simplifies the robot system by reducing the actuator number but also provides the robot adaptability. Therefore the under-actuation mechanism has been well used in the hand wearable robot. Among various transmissions used for the under-actuated robots, the under-actuated tendon transmission has shown advantages in making the robot compact and light. It is because the tendon is compliant with a small cross-section area, so it can pass through the joints without restrictions. In some researches, Bowden cable has been used to enhance these advantages by locating heavy and bulky components such as the actuators, controllers, and battery far from the robot.

However since the tendon-driven under-actuated system requires carefull consideration not to induce the friction and elongation, I have investigated a method to find the optimal under-actuated tendon routing. In this study, it was possible to find total \(2^{n+1}-1\) number of under-actuated tendon routings when the system has \(n\) fingers. Details will be added after the paper publication.