Considerations for follow the leader motion of extensible tendon driven continuum robots
Path following and follow the leader motion is particularly desirable for minimally invasive surgery in confined spaces which can only be reached using tortuous paths, e.g. through natural orifices. While path following and followthe leader motion can be achieved by hyper redundant snake robots, their size is usually not applicable for medical applications. Continuum robots, such as tendon driven or concentric tube mechanisms, fulfill the size requirements for minimally invasive surgery, but yet follow the leader motion is not inherently provided. In fact, parameters of the manipulator's section curvatures and translation have to be chosen wisely a priori. In this paper, we consider a tendon driven continuum robot with extensible sections. After reformulating the forward kinematics model, we formulate prerequisites for follow the leader motion and present a general approach to determine a sequence of robot configurations to achieve follow the leader motion along a given 3D path. We evaluate our approach in a series of simulations with 3D paths composed of constant curvature arcs and general 3D paths described by B spline curves. Our results show that mean path errors ;0.4mm and mean tip errors ;1.6mm can theoretically be achieved for constant curvature paths and ;2mm and ;3.1mm for general B spline curves respectively.
2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)