Investigating Various Force Control Techniques Effect on a Flexible Continuum Robot

Abstract

Continuum Robots are nature inspired manipulators capable of continuous bending along their structure to cope in environments where conventional rigid robots come short, such as constrained, or non-uniform environments. To ensure safe interaction with the environment, Force Control is needed, which ensures compliant behavior of the robot while constraining the force applied. The purpose of this paper is to first present the Continuum robot’s kinematics and dynamics model using Piece-wise constant curvature method and Lagrangian Euler method for Multi-Section Continuum robot. Then, to formulate and examine four types of Force Control: Compliant Control, Impedance Control, Explicit Impedance Force Control, and Admittance Control. Simulations were conducted on MATLAB Simulink to test the Robot’s model with these different controllers. The results successfully showed that the continuum robot’s simulation was able to comply with the environment using the first two controllers, and also track a desired force using the other two controllers.