Construction and Control of Massive Hydraulic Micro-actuator-sensor Array

in robotics, pharmaceutics, aerospace, etc. Compared with electrically and/or pneumatically powered actuator array, hydraulic actuator has the comprehensive advantages of higher force density (i.e. force / actuation area), better controllability, and simpler remote control accessibility. This paper presents approaches to construct and control a massive hydraulic micro actuator array. The massive hydraulic actuator array is originally constructed for project " Digital Clay " (a novel hydraulic actuated human machine interface device) as the tangible human and machine interaction media. A pin-rod planar actuator array is investigated in this work. In this paper, designs of the practical kinematical structure are discussed, proposed control methods for the actuator array are introduced and experiment results are presented.

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