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Tuneable Stiffness Design of Soft Continuum Manipulator

  • Conference paper
Intelligent Robotics and Applications

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9246))

Abstract

Soft continuum robots are highly deformable and manoeuvrable manipulators, capable of navigating through confined space and interacting safely with their surrounding environment, making them ideal for minimally invasive surgical applications. A crucial requirement of a soft robot is to control its overall stiffness efficiently, in order to execute the necessary surgical task in an unstructured environment. This paper presents a comparative study detailing the stiffness characterization of two soft manipulator designs and the formulation of a dynamic stiffness matrix for the purpose of disturbance rejection and stiffness control for precise tip positioning. An empirical approach is used to accurately describe the stiffness characteristics along the length of the manipulator and the derived stiffness matrix is applied in real-time control to reject disturbances. Further, the capability of the two types of soft robots to reject disturbances using the dynamic control technique is tested and compared. The results presented in this paper provide new insights into controlling the stiffness of soft continuum robots for minimally invasive surgical applications.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK

    Seri Mastura Mustaza, Chakravarthini Saaj & Wissam A. Albukhanajer

  2. Division of Mechanical, Medical and Aerospace Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK

    Duale Mahdi, Constantina Lekakou & Yahya Elsayed

  3. Przemyslowy Instytut Automatyki i Pomiarow, Al Jerozolimskie 202, 02-486, Warsaw, Poland

    Jan Fras

Authors
  1. Seri Mastura Mustaza
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  2. Duale Mahdi
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  3. Chakravarthini Saaj
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  4. Wissam A. Albukhanajer
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  5. Constantina Lekakou
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  6. Yahya Elsayed
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  7. Jan Fras
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seri Mastura Mustaza .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

    Honghai Liu

  2. Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan

    Naoyuki Kubota

  3. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Xiangyang Zhu

  4. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Rüdiger Dillmann

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Mustaza, S.M. et al. (2015). Tuneable Stiffness Design of Soft Continuum Manipulator. In: Liu, H., Kubota, N., Zhu, X., Dillmann, R. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9246. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22873-0_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22873-0_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22872-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22873-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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