Abstracts

Abstract

Recently, decreasing costs for robots and control components have led to a broader acceptance of different kinds of robots. Hence, various fields of application start to flourish. As this is especially true for the field of service robotics it is typically implying an increasing physical human-machine-interaction. In this case a soft appearance yields major benefits, as it prevents injuries corresponding to an inherent safety of the system and, in theory, enables the robot to obtain virtually unlimited degrees of freedom. In this chapter the possibilities of the use of shape memory alloys for distributed actuators will be discussed by reference to application examples and implications for the control of such systems will be pointed out in detail.