Design and Kinematics Analysis of a Two-Segment Continuum Robot for Flexible Exploration

This work presents a 4-DOF two-segment continuum robot for flexible exploration, which consists of a two-segment continuum joint, a driving unit, and a rigid tube. The proposed continuum robot features high motion accuracy and dexterity, sufficient load capacity and stability, achieving an effective balance between high dexterity and load capacity. The kinematics analysis of proposed continuum robot has been conducted, and the validity of the proposed design has been verified through relevant experiments. The constant curvature bending performance experiment reveals that the average positioning error is less than 2.39% under both coplanar and orthogonal configurations, demonstrating the excellent constant curvature performance for kinematic modeling and control. The workspace experiment shows a range of about 170mm×170mm×120mm, which meets the operational requirements of pelvic exploration surgery. Furthermore, the inverse kinematics solutions experiment validates the accuracy of the particle swarm optimization in inverse kinematics of the proposed continuum robot.