FORWARD KINEMATIC MODELING OF CONSTANT CURVATURE CONTINUUM ROBOTS USING DUAL QUATERNIONS

Different approaches have been applied to derive the kinematics of continuum robots with the assumption of piecewise constant curvature. Despite all these approaches produce identical results and can be reduced to the homogeneous transformation matrix, a particular approach could result to be preferable among the others, with respect to the actual numerical application, thanks to the characteristics of its mathematical formulation. In this paper the above mentioned kinematics is approached through the use of dual quaternions. The resulting formulation offers remarkable characteristics of compactness and numerical efficiency compared with those of the homogeneous transformation matrix.