Cooperative Continuum Robots: Concept, Modeling, and Workspace Analysis (original) (raw)

Continuum Robots for Manipulation Applications: A Survey

Journal of Robotics

This paper presents a literature survey documenting the evolution of continuum robots over the past two decades (1999–present). Attention is paid to bioinspired soft robots with respect to the following three design parameters: structure, materials, and actuation. Using this three-faced prism, we identify the uniqueness and novelty of robots that have hitherto not been publicly disclosed. The motivation for this study comes from the fact that continuum soft robots can make inroads in industrial manufacturing, and their adoption will be accelerated if their key advantages over counterparts with rigid links are clear. Four different taxonomies of continuum robots are included in this study, enabling researchers to quickly identify robots of relevance to their studies. The kinematics and dynamics of these robots are not covered, nor is their application in surgical manipulation.

Hybrid motion/force control of multi-backbone continuum robots

The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2015

The recent growth of surgical applications exploiting continuum robots demands for new control paradigms that ensure safety by controlling interaction forces of tele-operated end-effectors. In this paper, we present the modeling, sensing and control of multi-backbone continuum robots in a unified framework for hybrid motion/force control. Multi-backbone continuum robots allow to estimate forces and torques at the operational point by monitoring loads along their actuation lines without the need for a dedicated transducer at the operational point. This capability is indeed crucial in emerging fields such as robotic surgery where cost and strict sterilization guidelines prevent the adoption of a dedicated sensor to provide force feedback from the sterile field. To advance further the force sensing capabilities of multi-backbone continuum robots, we present a new framework for hybrid motion and force control of continuum robots with intrinsic force sensing capabilities. The framework i...

Kinematics Modeling and Simulation Analysis of Variable Curvature Kinematics Continuum Robots

2021

Continuum robots increasingly attract researchers’ interest as long as an accurate solution for their modeling is still outstanding, in particular that having a variable curvature. The key issues in continuum robots are its kinematics models due to: structure complexity, equations nonlinearity, redundancy resolution, and so on. To tackle those issues, the first contribution presented in this paper provides with a methodology to simplify the calculation’s complexity of the Forward Kinematics Models (FKMs) of variable curvature continuum robots. The second one presents a numerical solution to their Inverse Kinematics Models (IKMs) by using a powerful optimization method, namely Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), taking into account specific constraints in both the configuration space and in the Cartesian space. Simulation examples through Matlab software have been carried out to verify and analyze the significance of the proposed contributions approaches. It is noteworthy that the pro...

Kinematics Analyzing of a Spatial Multi-Section Continuum Robot

TUYỂN TẬP HỘI NGHỊ KHOA HỌC TOÀN QUỐC LẦN THỨ NHẤT ĐỘNG LỰC HỌC VÀ ĐIỀU KHIỂN, 2019

Over the past several years, a new class of robots, known as soft robots has been studied by a number of researchers. One of the types of the soft robots is continuum robot which has high degree of freedom or continuous, backbone structures. In this article, a spatial multi-section continuum robot with elastic backbone are considered. The forward and inverse kinematics problem of a spatial three-section continuum robot are solved as the illustrative example. Forward kinematics is the first step towards solving the inverse kinematics and dynamics problem. Inverse kinematics problem plays important role in designing the control system for robots.