Abstract
Tendon actuation is one of the most prominent actuation principles for continuum robots. To date, a wide variety of modelling approaches has been derived to describe the deformations of tendon-driven continuum robots. Motivated by the need for a comprehensive overview of existing methodologies, this work summarizes and outlines state-of-the-art modelling approaches. In particular, the most relevant models are classified based on backbone representations and kinematic as well as static assumptions. Numerical case studies are conducted to compare the performance of representative modelling approaches from the current state-of-the-art, considering varying robot parameters and scenarios. The approaches show different performances in terms of accuracy and computation time. Guidelines for the selection of the most suitable approach for given designs of tendon-driven continuum robots and applications are deduced from these results.
Highlights
Continuum robots are slender and soft manipulators that are mainly characterized by their compliance and high dexterity
In order to account for this external force, we propose the inclusion of an additional parameter, εj to account for the twist in each subsegment
The Constant Curvature (CC) model gives identical results as the VC model, which is expected since considering fully constrained tendons without any external force leads to a robot with constant curvature (Camarillo et al, 2008b)
Summary
Continuum robots are slender and soft manipulators that are mainly characterized by their compliance and high dexterity These properties together with their ability to follow non-linear trajectories and easy miniaturization enables applications in areas such as minimal-invasive surgery (Burgner-Kahrs et al, 2015) or inspection as well as assembly in confined spaces. Due to their inherent compliance, the deformation of continuum robots is highly affected by the presence of external forces. Such forces generally occur at the robot’s tip when interacting with the environment during deployment using different tools fixed at the end-effector. An overview of different actuation strategies for continuum robots is reviewed in BurgnerKahrs et al (2015)
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