Improving the stability of a planar tape-spring hyper-redundant manipulator

Abstract

The planar tape-spring hyper-redundant manipulator presented in this paper is mainly constructed from tape springs, fixed-drive components, and mobile-drive components. It not only has high robustness and excellent transformability, but also high packaging efficiency. However, when the manipulator extends to a long range in motion experiments, some segments of the tape springs buckle. To address this drawback, a kinematic model of the planar tape-spring hyper-redundant manipulator is established, and, a configuration planning method based on a virtual spring model is proposed to solve the inverse kinematics problem. To enhance stability, the column stability is then incorporated into the configuration planning model. This approach relies on only configuration planning to prevent buckling. An alternative approach of adding auxiliary rods into the manipulator is also proposed. With this method, extra intermediate supports have been added to the manipulator. The effective column length of some segments is shortened, which effectively increases the critical buckling load of those segments of the tape spring. Finally, a prototype was subjected to motion and stability experiments to validate the presented approaches and analysis.