On the Kinematic Modeling of a Class of Continuum Manipulators

Othman Lakhal (1) , Achille Melingui (2) , Thor Morales Bieze (1) , Coralie Escande (3) , Blaise Conrard (1) , Rochdi Merzouki (4, 5)

1 CRIStAL - Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille - UMR 9189
2 Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering Department of Ecole Nationale Supérieure Polytechnique, the University of Yaoundé
3 LAGIS-MOCIS
4 Polytech Lille - École polytechnique universitaire de Lille
5 MOCIS - Méthodes et Outils pour la Conception Intégrée de Systèmes

— This paper addresses the forward kinematic model (FKM) of a continuum manipulator, namely the Compact Bionic Handling Assistant (CBHA). This model is an essential step in the design of an autonomous robot control. The CBHA is considered as a concatenation of three degrees of freedom (DoF) parallel robot with 3UPS-1UP (Universal-Prismatic-Spherical) joint structure along the backbone. A mathematical solution of the inverse kinematic problem of such manipulators is easy to derive; however, the forward kinematic problem is mathematically intractable. Therefore, a FKM of the CBHA based on the IKM of each parallel robot is proposed. A neural-network-based hybrid approach that solves the FKM with a good degree of accuracy is developed in this paper. The proposed approach is validated by real measurements obtained by using an industrial manipulator (Kuka) as an external sensor. A comparison with a quantitative geometric approach, according to the model accuracy is also presented.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Systèmes et contrôle [cs.SY]; Modélisation et simulation; Automatique

Othman Lakhal, Achille Melingui, Thor Morales Bieze, Coralie Escande, Blaise Conrard, et al.. On the Kinematic Modeling of a Class of Continuum Manipulators. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, Dec 2014, Bali, Indonesia. ⟨hal-01660745⟩