Asymptotic regulation of a one-section continuum manipulator

Abstract

Continuum manipulators are robotic manipulators built using one continuous, elastic, and highly deformable "backbone" instead of multiple rigid links connected by joints. This paper extends a previous control result for planar continuum robots by proposing a new asymptotic convergence argument for a PD-plus-feedforward controller. The benefit of the asymptotic arguments is that the backbone bending stiffness can be adaptively updated by the controller if it is not known a priori.