Micrometer Positioning Accuracy With a Planar Parallel Continuum Robot

Parallel Continuum Robots (PCR) have several advantages over classical articulated robots, notably a large workspace, miniaturization capabilities and safe human-robot interactions. However, their low accuracy is still serious drawback. Indeed, conditions to be met for PCR reach high accuracy, namely: repeatable mechanical structure, correct kinematic model, proper estimation of the model’s parameters. In this article, we propose methodology that allows reaching micrometer with PCR. This approach emphasizes importance using continuum mechanism, identifying most influential parameters an accurate model robot precisely measuring them. The experimental results show proposed 3.3 µm in position 0.5 mrad orientation 10 mm long circular path. These push current limits make them good potential candidates automatic positioning tasks.