1 PrefaceMy name is Sergio Jainandunsing, 23 years old study at the TU Delft. I am a second year master student following the master Mechanical engineering, Biomechanical design. The professor guiding me was Professor J. Herder. This master thesis was partly done at Takeda Lab, Tokyo institute of Technology in Japan. I spent half a year (from 04.11.2014 till 25.04.2015) in this lab under the counseling of Professor Y. Takeda and D. Matsuura. I chose Japan because the country and culture always interested me and I wanted to go abroad. I learned a lot about the culture there and travelled many places. The guidance and help I received at the Lab were great and I would like to thank everyone there for their help. During my time in Japan I started working on my master thesis and did everything there up till the final experiment. Since I was out of time I did the final experiment back home at TU Delft. The other lab members ranged from 4th year bachelor students to 2nd year master students. There were around 16 members in my lab at that time. Some of them were exchange students. They were all helpful and nice and I made some good friends there. My time in Japan was a great experience and I would advise anyone, if they have the possibility, to go abroad. It adds a lot to your study and life experience. AbstractHyper redundant manipulators are becoming more and more popular. Research in this field has increased rapidly over the years. When designing a hyper redundant manipulator, it is important to consider which actuation you want to use. There are many different types of actuations available to actuate a hyper redundant manipulator. They have different advantages and disadvantages. Choosing which actuation to use, is important for the whole design. In this literature review an overview is given of how each actuation works and of the advantages and disadvantages of each type of actuation. Each type of actuation will be classified according to 3 criteria (Performance, Simplicity and Compactness). Pneumatic and tendon actuation perform the best overal.