Towards a Hyper-Redundant Haptic Display

This paper discusses how to utilise the known advantages of redundancy in the design of haptic interfaces. The use of additional joints allows a significantly larger workspace, while reducing the overall device size. Moreover, an increase in a variety of dexterity measures and a singularity robust redundancy resolution can be achieved. Besides a review of standard redundant kinematical designs for industrial robots a novel hyper-redundant design with 10 degrees-offreedom (DOF) considering the very specific requirements of haptic interfaces is proposed and discussed. Numerical simulations of standard methods for inverse kinematics resolution, namely pseudo inverse control and the projection of some side criterion on the nullspace of the Jacobian are compared and evaluated.