Design And Dynamic Modeling Of A Continuum Robot

Conventional rigid robots have been widely used in the world,but they are not suitable for operation in unstructured or highly constrained environments due to the lacking of flexibility.Continuum robots have attracted increasing focus in recent years for their intrinsic compliance that allows for dexterous and safe movements.On the other hand,the compliance reduces the structural stiffness,and therefore leads to the issue on control precision.This thesis presents the design of an octopus inspired continuum robot using hybrid actuation.The actuator utilizes a resilient spring embedded in the pneumatic muscle which can help the muscle to go back to its neutral position when the actuating force or external force is canceled.There is also a cable going through the muscle chamber to provide fine adjustment of the muscle length,which increases the positioning precision of the robot.A 3-dimensional(3-D)dynamic model is then developed by using mass-damper-spring system based networks.We divide the robot into multiple segments and use the mass-damper-spring system to replace the edges of each segment.We use the Runge-Kutta algorithm to calculate the motion of the robot.In this model,elastic deformation,actuating forces and external forces are taken into account simultaneously.Experiments are conducted finally to evaluate the performance of the prototype and the model.A good agreement is found between the two.