Paper Info
Title
Variable stiffness structural design of a dual-segment continuum manipulator with independent stiffness and angular position
Abstract
•This paper studies the challenging problem of variable stiffness for a class of multisegment continuum manipulators with pneumatically actuated modular mechanisms. The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows.•Following our previous work on the single-segment continuum manipulator [15], we present a dual-segment continuum manipulator composed of a leading unit and a follower unit. By means of the pressure variation of the PMAs in each unit, the independent unit locking can be guaranteed in the sense that no auxiliary structures, such as nonlinear springs [36], [37], [38] or locking devices [39], [40], [41], are employed.•We propose a stiffness model for a class of pneumatically actuated continuum manipulators that include couplings and interconnections between the parallel and serial arranged PMAs. This model exhibits the relationship between the stiffness of each unit and the inflation pressure of PMAs such that the computational burden needed in other works [15,16,17,45,46,48,49,56,57,61,62] is eliminated.•Unlike the existing multisegment manipulators that are limited by the coupling of the angular position and stiffness [23,24,25,42,56,57,63], as well as the complex configuration in each modular mechanism [58], [59], [60], the presented dual-segment continuum manipulator allows the stiffness to be changed independently of the angular position via utilizing a simple design with only one actuator type (i.e., the PMA).
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.rcim.2020.102000
Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Dual-segment continuum manipulator,Variable stiffness,Stiffness model,Independent unit locking
Journal
67
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0736-5845
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xifeng Gao133.40
Xingchen Li200.34
Changsheng Zhao300.34
Lina Hao4511.02
Chaoqun Xiang514.41