Kinematics modeling for a kinematic-mechanics coupling continuum manipulator

In this paper, the kinematics modeling of a notched continuum manipulator is presented, which includes the mechanics-based forward kinematics and the curve-fitting-based inverse kinematics. In order to establish the forward kinematics model by using D-H procedure, the compliant continuum manipulator featuring the hyper-redundant degrees of freedom (DoFs) is simplified into finite discrete joints. To reduce the effect of the hyper-redundancy for the continuum manipulator's inverse kinematic model, the 'curve-fitting' approach is utilized to map the end position to the deformation angle of the continuum manipulator. By the proposed strategy, the inverse kinematics of the hyper-redundant continuum manipulator can be solved by using the traditional geometric method. The proposed methodology is validated experimentally on a piece of triangle notches continuum manipulator, which illustrates the ability of our proposed model to solve the inverse kinematics of the hyper-redundant continuum manipulator, and also can be used as a generic method for such notched continuum manipulators.