Design and Implementation of Hydraulic-Cable driven Manipulator for Disaster Response Operation.

This paper introduces a new hydraulic manipulator with hydraulic-cable driven actuation (HCA) modules for disaster response mobile-manipulation. The hydraulic actuation system has the potential to apply disaster-response application, because it has a higher power-to-weight ratio and robustness to external impacts than electric motor actuation. However, using a conventional hydraulic manipulators is inappropriate because the revolute joint uses conventional actuators, such as linear cylinders and vanes, which have some limitations: 1) linear cylinder: small range of motion, 2) vane: low torque-toweight ratio. To overcome these limitations, we propose new 3DOF manipulator which has a larger workspace than the conventional hydraulic manipulator and comparable payloadto-weight ratio. To this end, we use hydraulic-cable driven actuation modules from our previous research. Experimental results verify the basic performance of the actuator modules and manipulator and their capability to perform various disaster response tasks.