Displacement-Actuated Continuum Robots: A Joint Space Abstraction

Abstract: The displacement-actuated continuum robot as an abstraction has been shown as a key abstraction to significantly simplify and improve approaches due to its relation to the Clarke transform. To highlight further potentials, we revisit and extend this abstraction that features an increasingly popular length extension and an underutilized twisting. For each extension, the corresponding mapping from the joint values to the local coordinates of the manifold embedded in the joint spaces is provided. Each mapping is characterized by its compactness and linearity.