A Hybrid Position/Force Control Method for a Continuum Robot With Robotic and Environmental Compliance

Continuum robots have become a research focus because of their wide range of applications. However, because of the complexity of the mathematical models and the modeling inaccuracies of the continuum robot, the development of an effective control method is a particularly challenging task. This paper presents a proposed hybrid position/force control model of a continuum robot based on robotic and environmental compliance. For a continuum robot, first, by theoretical derivation, the forward kinematics and inverse kinematics between the driving space and task space are given directly. Moreover, a dynamics model of the continuum robot is established by the Lagrange method. Using the kinematics and dynamics models of the continuum robot described above, a new hybrid position/force control model for a continuum robot based on the compliance of the continuum robot and environment is proposed, to allow the end position of the continuum robot to be modified by the deformation of the continuum robot and environment. Moreover, the stability of the proposed hybrid position/force control model is analyzed by input–output stability theory. Finally, the experiments show that the proposed hybrid position/force control for the continuum robot is feasible.