Over the past several years, there has been a rapidly expanding interest in the the study and construction o,f a new class of robot manipulators which utilize high degree of freedom, or continuous, backbone structures. I n this paper, we consider and illustrate some basic properties of a class of “hyper-redundant” robots, known as “continuum” robots. W e base our analysis around remotely-driven...

In this work we describe an autonomous soft-bodied robot that is both self-contained and capable of rapid, continuum-body motion. We detail the design, modeling, fabrication, and control of the soft fish, focusing on enabling the robot to perform rapid escape responses. The robot employs a compliant body with embedded actuators emulating the slender anatomical form of a fish. In addition, the r...

Magnetic Continuum Robots In article number 2000211, Niandong Jiao, Lianqing Liu, and co-workers propose a method of steering miniaturized flexible magnetic continuum robot in the enlarged workspace electromagnetic navigation system. This can greatly enlarge effective workspace, aims to expand application for retrograde intrarenal surgery.

Continuum robotics has rapidly become a rich and diverse area of research, with many designs and applications demonstrated. Despite this diversity in form and purpose, there exists remarkable similarity in the fundamental simplified kinematic models that have been applied to continuum robots. However, this can easily be obscured, especially to a newcomer to the field, by the different applicati...

Traditional robots have rigid underlying structures that limit their ability to interact with their environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators have rigid links and can manipulate objects using only their specialised end effectors. These robots often encounter difficulties operating in unstructured and highly congested environments. A variety of animals and plants exhibit complex ...

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 par...