Configuration space impedance control for continuum manipulators

Despite their intrinsic structural compliance, a safe interaction of continuum robots with their environment requires a control strategy that is able to manage the compliant motion properly. This paper presents a peculiar strategy of application of the impedance control based on kinematic and dynamic models of the manipulator's sections. The control approach is able to deal with unpredicted contacts which can occur in unknown locations along the whole manipulator while the resulting contact forces don't need to be measured or estimated. The control concept is applied to a single section of the Bionic Handling Assistant, but its application can be extended to all the continuum robots modeled with the piecewise constant curvature approach.