Design and Evaluation of a Continuum Robot with Discreted link joints for Cardiovascular Interventions

This paper deals with the design, modelling, fabrication, and experiments of a novel continuum robot that can be used for cardiovascular interventions. In this paper, a new design of bending joints of the continuum robot and its kinematical modelling are proposed. The bending joints of the proposed robot are designed to be easy to miniaturize and have a wide motion range. The continuum robot consists of an inner guide and an outer guide, each having two degrees of freedom (DOF). The 2DOF bending joints are driven by antagonistic actuation and the actuation part of the continuum robot is implemented to control the stiffness of the bending joints. When the pretensions of the cables of the bending joints are adjusted, the structural stiffness of the bending joints can be controlled. In this paper, the entire system of the continuum robot has been implemented and the basic performance of the proposed continuum robot has been verified. The proposed robot was confirmed to be bent actively in the S-shape curve.