Design and Inverse Kinematics of Continuum Robots

Abstract

Continuum robots, characterized by their hyper-redundant and flexible structures, have gained significant attention in fields such as minimally invasive surgery, remote inspection, and soft manipulation. Their complex design and highly nonlinear kinematic behavior present substantial modeling and control challenges. This paper presents a complete framework encompassing the design, modeling, and inverse kinematics solution for a novel two-segment, tendon-driven continuum robot utilizing an elastic spring backbone for enhanced compliance and structural simplicity. A constant curvature forward kinematic model is presented. Subsequently, an efficient numerical approach for solving the challenging inverse kinematics problem is introduced by adapting the Jacobian-based Newton-Raphson method and incorporating the Moore-Penrose Pseudoinverse. This strategy effectively manages the robot's redundancy, ensuring smooth and reliable trajectory generation. Experimental verification confirms the robot's feasibility, demonstrating that the system successfully navigates along the trajectories computed by the inverse kinematics, thus validating the reasonableness of the kinematic model and ensuring seamless and smooth operation. These findings provide a robust foundation for improving motion planning of simple continuum robot platforms in practical applications.