Construction and control of massive hydraulic miniature-actuator-sensor array

Massive actuator arrays have found applications in robotics, pharmaceutics, aerospace, etc. Compared with either electrically or pneumatically powered actuator arrays, a hydraulic array has the advantages of higher force density (i.e. force / actuation volume), better controllability, and simpler remote control accessibility. This paper presents approaches to construct and control a massive hydraulic miniature actuator array. The massive hydraulic actuator array was originally constructed for project “Digital Clay” (a novel hydraulic actuated human machine interface device) as a 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.