Analysis of a 5-bar finger mechanism having redundant actuators with applications to stiffness and frequency modulations

For a 5-bar finger mechanism with redundant actuators, it is shown that judicial choice of the location of one redundant actuator greatly enhances the load handling capacity of the system when compared to that of nonredundant systems, And, it is also shown that excessive redundant actuation enables the system to modulate the end-point stiffness or motion frequency by internal load distributions. Especially, the motion frequency modulation via internal loads in redundantly actuated closed-chain systems is believed to be fairly new. To show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, several simulation results are illustrated