A Continuum Manipulator for Open-Source Surgical Robotics Research and Shared Development

Clark, Angus B.; Mathivannan, Visakan; Rojas, Nicolás

doi:10.1109/tmrb.2020.3041391

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…An in-depth survey of more than 80 major projects and initiatives across different robotic communities is provided by Patel et al (2022) highlighting the clear benefits and associated challenges. In our research community, continuum robotics, an incipient trend towards releasing software (Till et al, 2019;Janabi-Sharifi et al, 2021;Rao et al, 2021;Sadati et al, 2021;Bentley et al, 2022), hardware (Blumenschein et al, 2020;Clark et al, 2021;Deutschmann et al, 2022), tutorials (Till et al, 2019;Janabi-Sharifi et al, 2021;Rao et al, 2021) and datasets (Grassmann et al, 2022a) can be observed. While isolated small projects exist, an encompassing project promoting research in the same way as described by Patel et al (2022) is sorely needed yet still missing.…”

Section: Open-source Roboticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open continuum robotics–one actuation module to create them all

Grassmann,

Shentu,

Hamoda

et al. 2024

Front. Robot. AI

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Experiments on physical continuum robot are the gold standard for evaluations. Currently, as no commercial continuum robot platform is available, a large variety of early-stage prototypes exists. These prototypes are developed by individual research groups and are often used for a single publication. Thus, a significant amount of time is devoted to creating proprietary hardware and software hindering the development of a common platform, and shifting away scarce time and efforts from the main research challenges. We address this problem by proposing an open-source actuation module, which can be used to build different types of continuum robots. It consists of a high-torque brushless electric motor, a high resolution optical encoder, and a low-gear-ratio transmission. For this article, we create three different types of continuum robots. In addition, we illustrate, for the first time, that continuum robots built with our actuation module can proprioceptively detect external forces. Consequently, our approach opens untapped and under-investigated research directions related to the dynamics and advanced control of continuum robots, where sensing the generalized flow and effort is mandatory. Besides that, we democratize continuum robots research by providing open-source software and hardware with our initiative called the Open Continuum Robotics Project, to increase the accessibility and reproducibility of advanced methods.

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Section: Open-source Roboticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open continuum robotics–one actuation module to create them all

Grassmann,

Shentu,

Hamoda

et al. 2024

Front. Robot. AI

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“…The compliant joint backbone CMs are found in two forms, which are (1) pivoted compliant joints [135] and (2) pivot less compliant joints [160,[170][171][172][173][174][175][176]. There are various materials selected for the fabrication of compliant joint backbones, which are either metals or polymers.…”

Section: Compliant Joint Backbone and Soft Materials Backbonementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Super elastic nitinol (Ni-Ti) is the popular choice among metal alloys as the compliant joint material for producing CMs for repair/inspection/maintenance works [171][172][173]177]. The manufacturing techniques used for making polymer-based compliant joint CMs are commonly 3D printing [174][175][176]. As per the available literature, compliant joint CMs are seems to be the most promising CM type for utilization in maintenance/repair works.…”

Section: Compliant Joint Backbone and Soft Materials Backbonementioning

confidence: 99%

Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots for Aerial Manipulation—A Survey of Fabrication Methods

Uthayasooriyan,

Vanegas,

Jalali

et al. 2024

Drones

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Aerial manipulators have seen a rapid uptake for multiple applications, including inspection tasks and aerial robot–human interaction in building and construction. Whilst single degree of freedom (DoF) and multiple DoF rigid link manipulators (RLMs) have been extensively discussed in the aerial manipulation literature, continuum manipulators (CMs), often referred to as continuum robots (CRs), have not received the same attention. This survey seeks to summarise the existing works on continuum manipulator-based aerial manipulation research and the most prevalent designs of continuous backbone tendon-driven continuum robots (TDCRs) and multi-link backbone TDCRs, thereby providing a structured set of guidelines for fabricating continuum robots for aerial manipulation. With a history spanning over three decades, dominated by medical applications, CRs are now increasingly being used in other domains like industrial machinery and system inspection, also gaining popularity in aerial manipulation. Fuelled by diverse applications and their associated challenges, researchers have proposed a plethora of design solutions, primarily falling within the realms of concentric tube (CT) designs or tendon-driven designs. Leveraging research works published in the past decade, we place emphasis on the preparation of backbones, support structures, tendons, stiffness control, test procedures, and error considerations. We also present our perspectives and recommendations addressing essential design and fabrication aspects of TDCRs in the context of aerial manipulation, and provide valuable guidance for future research and development endeavours in this dynamic field.

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“…Such continuum robots are widely modeled as constant curvature models. These robots have infinite degrees of freedom [5,6] and continuum part(s), whose curve can be approximated with continuous tangent vectors [7,8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A single motor-driven continuum robot that can be designed to deform into a complex shape with curvature distribution

Yoshikawa

Shimizu

Umedachi

2023

Preprint

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This paper proposes a method to deform a continuum robot into a complex shape with distributed curvature using a single motor drive. This continuum robot can be deformed to a desired shape by placing tendon guides at appropriate intervals. We used several target shapes, including clothoid and sin curves, as well as a circular curve of constant curvature and confirmed that the deformed shapes match them both in the simulation and prototype. This paper proposes two models of continuum robots. One is the Plain Model in which the tendons are parallel to the rod and the Penetration Model in which the tendon penetrates to the rod. By placing the penetrating position(s), this continuum robot can be deformed into a shape with inflection point(s). We designed a mathematical model to simulate the deformed shape of the prototype to obtain the proper placement of the guides and penetration point(s). Through the optimization, it was able to find the parameters that, in most cases, result in the error of less than 4% between the target and deformed shapes. We applied these conditions to the prototype and evaluated the errors, which were approximately 10%, the same as the related works that use a conventional constant curvature model. We think that the results of this paper can be applied to reduce the number of actuators required and the size and weight of continuum or biomimetic robots.

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A Continuum Manipulator for Open-Source Surgical Robotics Research and Shared Development

Cited by 16 publications

References 11 publications

Open continuum robotics–one actuation module to create them all

Open continuum robotics–one actuation module to create them all

Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots for Aerial Manipulation—A Survey of Fabrication Methods

A single motor-driven continuum robot that can be designed to deform into a complex shape with curvature distribution

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