Abstract
Soft continuum robots are highly deformable and manoeuvrable manipulators, capable of navigating through confined space and interacting safely with their surrounding environment, making them ideal for minimally invasive surgical applications. A crucial requirement of a soft robot is to control its overall stiffness efficiently, in order to execute the necessary surgical task in an unstructured environment. This paper presents a comparative study detailing the stiffness characterization of two soft manipulator designs and the formulation of a dynamic stiffness matrix for the purpose of disturbance rejection and stiffness control for precise tip positioning. An empirical approach is used to accurately describe the stiffness characteristics along the length of the manipulator and the derived stiffness matrix is applied in real-time control to reject disturbances. Further, the capability of the two types of soft robots to reject disturbances using the dynamic control technique is tested and compared. The results presented in this paper provide new insights into controlling the stiffness of soft continuum robots for minimally invasive surgical applications.
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