Preliminary design and study of a bio-inspired wire-driven serpentine robotic manipulator with direct drive capability

Abstract

Flexible or continuum robot arms have been studied for the past two decades and these robots are recently emerging in many applications such as surgery, rehabilitation, industry, among many others. For safe operation especially in the surgical areas, active compliance controls such as force or impedance controls for the flexible manipulators are required. Due to several restrictions such as small size, cost, sterilization in the surgical fields, however, a physical sensor attached at the distal end of the robot arm may be limited. Thus, this paper has designed a bio-inspired serpentine robotic manipulator based on direct drive mechanisms and individual tendon actuation structure so that the robotic arm has better inherent force sensing capability for the active compliance control and control performance comparing to conventional gear mechanism and an actuator structure composed of one actuator and a pair of opposed tendons. As a preliminary design and study, an overall design of the proposed flexible manipulator is suggested and identification of the direct drive is performed.