Design of a Teleoperated Rod-Driven Continuum Robot

Continuum robots have attracted increasing attention from robotic community due to their intrinsic compliance and high dexterity. However, the compliant body structures and multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) make it difficult for operators to intuitively regulate the configuration of continuum robots. Therefore, this paper presents a rod-driven continuum robot with teleoperation device achieving master-slave control. The master articulated manipulator has the same number of joints as the slave continuum robot. The slave continuum robot is equipped with two continuum joints with elastic backbones. Each joint possesses two DOFs and is driven by three elastic rods. The configuration parameters of the master manipulator are acquired by embedded sensors and return to a host computer. After kinematics calculating, the control command is sent to the slave continuum robot, to reproduce the configuration of the master manipulator. Experimental results show that the robotic system can achieve good master-slave following performance.