Continuum Arm Robotic Manipulator: A Review

Singh, Puneet; Krishna, C. Murali

doi:10.13189/ujme.2014.020603

Cited by 66 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(37 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To send a soft robot in an unstructured radiation environment for inspection purposes or delivery tasks, it must offer significant dexterity and mechanical compliance, with minimum control requirements. However, disadvantages of soft robots such as limited afforded strength and payload (Lee et al, 2017), limited control and autonomy (Trivedi et al, 2008;Singh and Krishna, 2014), need for tethering (Majidi, 2014;Schmitt et al, 2018), and limited sensory equipment (Rus and Tolley, 2015;Lee et al, 2017) still need to be overcome. To meet some of these demands, the soft actuators within the soft robot must enhance their functionality, which is limited by fabrication techniques (Marchese et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of 3D Printed Soft Robots in Radiation Environments and Comparison With Molded Counterparts

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Robots have an important role during inspection, clean-up, and sample collection in unstructured radiation environments inaccessible to humans. The advantages of soft robots, such as body morphing, high compliance, and energy absorption during impact, make them suitable for operating under extreme conditions. Despite their promise, the usefulness of soft robots under a radiation environment has yet to be assessed. In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of soft robots fabricated from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a common fabrication material, under radiation for the first time. We investigated gamma-induced mechanical damage in the PDMS materials' mechanical properties, including elongation, tensile strength, and stiffness. We selected three radiation environments from the nuclear industry to represent a wide range of radiation and then submerged a 3D printed hexapus robot into a radiation environment to estimate its operation time. Finally, to test the reliability of the 3D printed soft robots, we compared their performances with molded counterparts. To analyze performance results in detail, we also investigated dimensional errors and the effects of fabrication methods, nozzle size, and print direction on the stiffness of PDMS material. Results of this study show that with increasing exposure to gamma irradiation, the mechanical properties of PDMS decrease in functionality but are minimally impacted up to 20 kGy gamma radiation. Considering the fractional changes to the PDMS mechanical properties, it is safe to assume that soft robots could operate for 12 h in two of the three proposed radiation environments. We also verified that the 3D printed soft robots can perform better than or equal to their molded counterparts while being more reliable.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of 3D Printed Soft Robots in Radiation Environments and Comparison With Molded Counterparts

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Despite significant recent advancements in the development of CRs [95], [96], [97], control of CRs still poses several challenges due to their limited actuation channels, hyper-flexibility of their structure, and nonlinear models. Modeling and structural uncertainties, lack of exact forward kinematic (FK) solution (such as those used in rigid-link robots), and associated sensing devices lead to end-point positioning uncertainties.…”

Section: Control Of Continuum Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling and Visual Servoing of Single and Cooperative Continuum Robots

Norouzi-Ghazbi

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This thesis dealt with modeling and visual servoing (VS) of continuum robots (CRs) and one of their recently introduced configurations, cooperative-CRs (CCRs). Application-wise, the focus was on small-sized CRs which are a commonly used type of CRs in minimally invasive surgeries (MIS). First, an introduction to continuum robots, and various configurations of CRs were presented. In the next step, kinematic modeling of single-CR and CCRs were presented. Furthermore, dynamic modeling of smallsized CRs was studied. Tendon-driven small-sized CRs include continuous interaction between tendons and backbones, which introduce their own challenges into the modeling. To control the system, firstly, a visual predictive control (VPC) system was employed for a single CR. Many scenarios were simulated to investigate the performance of the control scheme including positioning tasks in the presence and absence of various actuation and visibility constraints, a comparative study between VPC and image-based visual servoing (IBVS) approaches, the effectiveness of the parameter of prediction horizon (Np) on the system performance, the effectiveness of depth estimation and Np on the error and convergence time, and system robustness to the noise of actuators and imaging process. Finally, the system performance was experimentally verified. In the next step, a new switching VS control approach was developed to control CCRs. As the CCR model is based on Cosserat rod approach, the corresponding differential kinematics is obtained numerically which may result in ill-behaved or computationally expensive Jacobian. To address this issue, a scaled and nondimensional IBVS (SND IBVS) control scheme was introduced which is used to navigate the system at the beginning of the positioning task. The stability of the system is also proved in the sense of Lyapunov. To study the performance of the proposed switching controller, various scenarios were simulated. Moreover, an experimental set-up for the automation of CRs was developed to be used as the platform for verification of the system controller and to be served as a test-bed for the future studies of this research.

show abstract

“…Unlike robots with rigid links, a continuum robot arm can be bent and stretched at any point ( Walker, 2013 ). Additionally, research is being conducted on robots that are mechanically similar to snakes and caterpillars ( Hirose and Yamada, 2009 ; Ishige et al, 2018 , 2019 ; Liu et al, 2020 ), for application in medicine as endoscopes ( Ikuta et al, 1988 ) and in disaster sites ( Kumar Singh and Krishna, 2014 ).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterization of continuum robot arms under reinforcement learning and derived improvements

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In robotics, soft continuum robot arms are a promising prospect owing to their redundancy and passivity; however, no comprehensive study exists that examines their characteristics compared to rigid manipulators. In this study, we examined the advantages of a continuum robot arm as compared to a typical and rigid seven-degree-of-freedom (7-DoF) robot manipulator in terms of performing various tasks through reinforcement learning. We conducted simulations for tasks with different characteristics that require control over position and force. Common tasks in robot manipulators, such as reaching, crank rotation, object throwing, and peg-in-hole were considered. The initial conditions of the robot and environment were randomized, aiming for evaluations including robustness. The results indicate that the continuum robot arm excels in the crank-rotation task, which is characterized by uncertainty in environmental conditions and cumulative rewards. However, the rigid robot arm learned better motions for the peg-in-hole task than the other tasks, which requires fine motion control of the end-effector. In the throwing task, the continuum robot arm scored well owing to its good handling of anisotropy. Moreover, we developed a reinforcement-learning method based on the comprehensive experimental results. The proposed method successfully improved the motion learning of a continuum robot arm by adding a technique to regulate the initial state of the robot. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first reinforcement-learning experiment with multiple tasks on a single continuum robot arm and is the first report of a comparison between a single continuum robot arm and rigid manipulator on a wide range of tasks. This simulation study can make a significant contribution to the design of continuum arms and specification of their applications, and development of control and reinforcement learning methods.

show abstract

Continuum Arm Robotic Manipulator: A Review

Cited by 66 publications

References 43 publications

Evaluation of 3D Printed Soft Robots in Radiation Environments and Comparison With Molded Counterparts

Evaluation of 3D Printed Soft Robots in Radiation Environments and Comparison With Molded Counterparts

Modeling and Visual Servoing of Single and Cooperative Continuum Robots

Characterization of continuum robot arms under reinforcement learning and derived improvements

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About