Manipulators have been widely used in modern industrial fields. The long arm with wire control has the advantages of light arm body structure, separation of control part with the execution arm, and long length with more flexibility in control, which makes it able to serve a wider range of application scenarios, especially many highly-radiation, polluted and confined environments, and greatly reduce the risks of injury to people and property during operation. In order to make a safe and easily operated mechanical arm which can be used for polluted environments, the author of this paper tried to use his knowledge and research experience to design and make a low-cost and environmentally friendly ultra-redundant wire-controlled long arm with the safe and easily available materials and components. The author designed and implemented a mechanical long arm with a universal joint structure driven by steering gears and a wire-controlled transmission. The arm body is composed of 8 controlled universal joints connected in series. It is controlled in two groups, and each group can realize two degrees of freedom, the 4 joints in a group ensure the same rotation angle through the mechanical structure. At the same time, the mapping model of motor and cable, and the mapping model of cable and rotation angle are constructed to realize the movement of the control unit at a given angle, and the author's design is verified by experiments.

Shengcong Wang. A Wire-driven Full Constraint Mechanical Long Arm with Digital Control. International Journal of Frontiers in Engineering Technology (2023), Vol. 5, Issue 10: 77-86. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJFET.2023.051012.

[1] Malone, Bob. "George Devol: a life devoted to invention, and robots." IEEE Spectrum Magazine. https://spectrum. ieee. org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/george-devol-a-life-de voted-to-invention-and-robots (2011).

[2] Westkämper, Engelbert, et al. "Task-oriented programming of large redundant robot motion." Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing 14.5-6 (1998): 363-375.

[3] Buckingham, Rob, and Andrew Graham. "Nuclear snake‐arm robots." Industrial Robot: An International Journal (2012).

[4] Kim, Yong-Jae, et al. "A stiffness-adjustable hyperredundant manipulator using a variable neutral-line mechanism for minimally invasive surgery." IEEE transactions on robotics 30.2 (2013): 382-395. 

[5] Paljug, Eric, Timothy Ohm, and Samad Hayati. "The JPL serpentine robot: a 12-DOF system for inspection." Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Vol. 3. IEEE, 1995.

[6] Wolf, Alon, et al. "A mobile hyper redundant mechanism for search and rescue tasks." Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003)(Cat. No. 03CH37453). Vol. 3. IEEE, 2003. 

[7] Brown, H. Ben, et al. "Design and control of a second-generation hyper-redundant mechanism." 2007 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems. IEEE, 2007.

[8] Hirose, Shigeo, and Shugen Ma. "Coupled tendon-driven multijoint manipulator." Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. IEEE Computer Society, 1991.

[9] Endo, Gen, Atsushi Horigome, and Atsushi Takata. "Super dragon: A 10-m-long-coupled tendon-driven articulated manipulator." IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 4.2 (2019): 934-941.

[10] Tang, Lei, et al. "Design of a cable-driven hyper-redundant robot with experimental validation." International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems 14.5 (2017): 1729881417734458.

[11] Yang, Jingzhou, Potratz Jason, and Karim Abdel-Malek. "A hyper-redundant continuous robot." Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006.. IEEE, 2006.

[12] McMahan, William, et al. "Field trials and testing of the OctArm continuum manipulator." Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006.. IEEE, 2006.

[13] Dong, Xin, et al. "Design and analysis of a family of snake arm robots connected by compliant joints." Mechanism and Machine Theory 77 (2014): 73-91.

[14] Liu, Shuntao, et al. "Development of a dexterous continuum manipulator for exploration and inspection in confined spaces." Industrial Robot: An International Journal (2016).

[15] Wooten, Michael B., and Ian D. Walker. "A novel vine-like robot for in-orbit inspection." 45th International Conference on Environmental Systems, 2015.

[16] Xu, Wenfu, Tianliang Liu, and Yangmin Li. "Kinematics, dynamics, and control of a cable-driven hyper-redundant manipulator." IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics 23.4 (2018): 1693-1704.

[17] Huang, Long, et al. "Design and Validation of a Novel Cable-Driven Hyper-Redundant Robot Based on Decoupled Joints." Journal of Robotics 2021 (2021).