Design of a manipulator for tele-operation applications

A manipulator for remote duplication of an operator's arm motion is presented. The focus of design is on the economic efficiency with limited payload, speed and accuracy ranges for a given application. The arm has eight degrees of freedom with upper arm, elbow, lower arm, wrist and end effector. The actuators employ screw-nut combination for maximum payload and self-locking feature with low cost geared motors. The end effector has three degrees of freedom for wrist and one degree of freedom for fingers. The three fingers are coupled by a triangular joint that offers approximately equal grasping forces among them and are operated by one actuator. The mechanism, which is composed of the combination of screw-nut-timing pulley, was designed for an upper arm. The motion range of the manipulator had been analyzed by a forward kinematics. The performance of the manipulator based on video motion capture of an operator had been verified by experiments.