Experimental verification of infinity norm approach for force maximization of manipulators driven by bi-articular actuators

Recently, there has been increasing attention on animal inspired manipulators equipped with bi-articular actuators. Bi-articular actuated manipulators usually present more actuators than joints, resulting in actuator redundancy. In order to resolve this torque load sharing problem, in this paper a new approach based on infinity norm is proposed and successfully implemented on BiWi, Bi-articularly actuated and Wire driven manipulator. The infinity norm model maximizes the force at the end effector given the maximum actuator joint torques. Therefore, it is an approach to optimize actuators design for bi-articularly actuated manipulators. The infinity norm approach is based only on linear functions for actuator redundancy resolution.