A kinematic equivalence trajectory planning method of hybrid active and passive cable-driven segmented hyper-redundant manipulator

A hybrid active and passive cable-driven segmented hyper-redundant manipulator is very flexible and dexterous to conduct tasks in highly cluttered environment. However, computation load of inverse kinematics and trajectory planning are also very large. In the paper, a kinematic equivalence method is proposed for the hybrid active and passive cable-driven segmented hyper-redundant manipulator to overcome the above challenge when the position and direction of end-effector are considered. The kinematic equivalence method is an effective way to solve the inverse kinematics and trajectory planning by simplifying and rearranging joints of each segment. The mechanism and joint layout of the manipulator are first analyzed. Then, the kinematics model is established by both traditional DH method and kinematic equivalence method. The calculated amount is decreased by reducing the number of rotation axis that needs to be processed in each segment. Furthermore, the desired trajectory is generated for the end effector of the arm to approach the target point. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a practical prototype, which has five segments and each segment consists of six subsegments. Simulation results verified the proposed method.