On the Disentanglement of Tube Inequalities in Concentric Tube Continuum Robots

Concentric tube continuum robots utilize nested tubes, which are subject to a set of inequalities. Current approaches to account for inequalities rely on branching methods such as if-else statements. It can introduce discontinuities, may result in a complicated decision tree, has a high wall-clock time, and cannot be vectorized. This affects the behavior and result of downstream methods in control, learning, workspace estimation, and path planning, among others. In this paper, we investigate a mapping to mitigate branching methods. We derive a lower triangular transformation matrix to disentangle the inequalities and provide proof for the unique existence. It transforms the interdependent inequalities into independent box constraints. Further investigations are made for sampling, control, and workspace estimation. Approaches utilizing the proposed mapping are at least 14 times faster (up to 176 times faster), generate always valid joint configurations, are more interpretable, and are easier to extend.

Open Continuum Robotics -- One Actuation Module to Create them All

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 letter, 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.