Behavioral Assessment of Various Control Laws Formulations for Position Tracking of Multi-sectioning Modeled Continuum Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a study on miniature continuum robots which can bend continuously along their length and can be constructed to be more than one section to increase their degrees of freedom. This study is concerned with providing the kinematics and the dynamics of the robot. The kinematic equations is provided by Piece-wise constant curvature (PCC) assumption which is based on curve geometry. The Dynamics of the robot are provided by the analysis of the Lagrangian equation. Next, three control strategies are applied on a two-section continuum robot model using MATLAB Simulink environment to demonstrate the effectiveness of each control loop. The three control strategies are Proportional Derivative (PD) control, Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC), and Sliding Mode Control (SMC). The simulation results show an advantage in performance for the intelligent controller (FLC) and the nonlinear robust control (SMC) over the PD control.