Kinematics Modeling and Motion Planning of Tendon Driven Continuum Manipulators

Continuum manipulators have important applications in the human–machine interaction fields. The kinematics, dynamics, and control issues of the continuum manipulators are rather different from a conventional rigid-link manipulator. By the aid of Lie groups theory and exponential coordinate representations, the kinematics of the continuum manipulators with piecewise constant curvatures and actuated by tendons is investigated in this paper. On the basis of differential kinematics analysis, the complete Jacobian of the continuum manipulators is derived analytically, and then a new motion planning approach, named as “dynamic coordination method” is presented for the multisegments continuum manipulators, which is a class of superredundant manipulators. The novel motion planning approach is featured by some appealing properties, and the feasibility of the modeling and the motion planning method is demonstrated by some numerical simulations.