Estimating Infinite-Dimensional Continuum Robot States From the Tip

Abstract: Knowing the state of a robot is critical for many problems, such as feedback control. For continuum robots, state estimation is an incredible challenge. First, the motion of a continuum robot involves many kinematic states, including poses, strains, and velocities. Second, all these states are infinite-dimensional due to the robot's flexible property. It has remained unclear whether these infinite-dimensional states are observable at all using existing sensing techniques. Recently, we presented a solution to this challenge. It was a mechanics-based dynamic state estimation algorithm, called a Cosserat theoretic boundary observer, which could recover all the infinite-dimensional robot states by only measuring the velocity twist of the tip. In this work, we generalize the algorithm to incorporate tip pose measurements for more tuning freedom. We also validate this algorithm offline using experimental data recorded from a tendon-driven continuum robot. We feed the recorded tendon force and tip measurements into a numerical solver of the Cosserat rod model based on our robot. It is observed that, even with purposely deviated initialization, the state estimates by our algorithm quickly converge to the recorded ground truth states and closely follow the robot's actual motion.