A hyper-redundant manipulator

“Hyper-redundant” manipulators have a very large number of actuatable degrees of freedom. The benefits of hyper-redundant robots include the ability to avoid obstacles, increased robustness with respect to mechanical failure, and the ability to perform new forms of robot locomotion and grasping. The authors examine hyper-redundant manipulator design criteria and the physical implementation of one particular design: a variable geometry truss

Discrete Cosserat Approach for Multi-Section Soft Robots Dynamics

In spite of recent progress, soft robotics still suffers from a lack of unified modeling framework. Nowadays, the most adopted model for the design and control of soft robots is the piece-wise constant curvature model, with its consolidated benefits and drawbacks. In this work, an alternative model for multisection soft robots dynamics is presented based on a discrete Cosserat approach, which, not only takes into account shear and torsional deformations, essentials to cope with out-of-plane external loads, but also inherits the geometrical and mechanical properties of the continuous Cosserat model, making it the natural soft robotics counterpart of the traditional rigid robotics dynamics model. The soundness of the model is demonstrated through extensive simulation and experimental results for both plane and out-of-plane motions.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Energy-based trajectory tracking and vibration control for multilink highly flexible manipulators

In this paper, a discrete model is adopted, as proposed by Hencky for elastica based on rigid bars and lumped rotational springs, to design the control of a lightweight planar manipulator with multiple highly flexible links. This model is particularly suited to deal with nonlinear equations of motion as those associated with multilink robot arms, because it does not include any simplification due to linearization, as in the assumed modes method. The aim of the control is to track a trajectory of the end effector of the robot arm, without the onset of vibrations. To this end, an energy-based method is proposed. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the presented approach

Kinematically optimal hyper-redundant manipulator configurations

“Hyper-redundant” robots have a very large or infinite degree of kinematic redundancy. This paper develops new methods for determining “optimal” hyper-redundant manipulator configurations based on a continuum formulation of kinematics. This formulation uses a backbone curve model to capture the robot's essential macroscopic geometric features. The calculus of variations is used to develop differential equations, whose solution is the optimal backbone curve shape. We show that this approach is computationally efficient on a single processor, and generates solutions in O(1) time for an N degree-of-freedom manipulator when implemented in parallel on O(N) processors. For this reason, it is better suited to hyper-redundant robots than other redundancy resolution methods. Furthermore, this approach is useful for many hyper-redundant mechanical morphologies which are not handled by known methods

Kinematic Analysis of a Flexible Tensegrity Robot

Conference Paper presented at The Joint International Conference of the XII International Conference on Mechanisms and Mechanical Transmissions (MTM) and the XXIII International Conference on Robotics (Robotics ’16)In the field of parallel kinematics few designs use highly deformable elements to obtain the end effector movement. Most compliant mechanisms rely on notches or shape changes to simulate a standard kinematic joint. In this work a kinematic model of a simple parallel continuum mechanism that combines a deformable element and cable is presented. The kinematic model is used to study the workspace of the manipulator and is validated by experimental measurements of a prototype.The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support received from the Spanish Government through the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Project DPI2015-64450-R) and the Regional Government of the Basque Country through the Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación (Project IT445-10) and UPV/EHU under program UFI 11/29

Control Space Reduction and Real-Time Accurate Modeling of Continuum Manipulators Using Ritz and Ritz-Galerkin Methods

To address the challenges with real-time accurate modeling of multi-segment continuum manipulators in the presence of significant external and body loads, we introduce a novel series solution for variable-curvature Cosserat rod static and Lagrangian dynamic method. By combining a modified Lagrange polynomial series solution, based on experimental observations, with Ritz and Ritz-Galerkin methods, the infinite modeling state space of a continuum manipulator is minimized to geometrical position of a handful of physical points (in our case two). As a result, a unified easy to implement vector formalism is proposed for the nonlinear impedance and configuration control. We showed that by considering the mechanical effects of highly elastic axial deformation, the model accuracy is increased up to 6%. The proposed model predicts experimental results with 6-8% (4-6 [mm]) mean error for the Ritz-Galerkin method in static cases and 16-20% (12-14 [mm]) mean error for the Ritz method in dynamic cases, in planar and general 3D motions. Comparing to five different models in the literature, our approximate solution is shown to be more accurate with the smallest possible number of modeling states and suitable for real-time modeling, observation and control applications