Development of a continuum robot using pneumatic artificial muscles

This paper presents the design concept of an intrinsic spatial continuum robot, of which arm segments are actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles. Since pneumatic artificial muscles supported the arm segments of the robot instead of a passive spring, the developed continuum robot was not only capable of following a given trajectory, but also varying its stiffness according to given external environment. Experiment results revealed that the proposed continuum robot showed versatile movements by controlling the pressure of supply air to pneumatic artificial muscles, and the well-coordinated pattern matching scheme based on low-cost webcams gave good performance in estimating the position and orientation of the end-effector of the spatial continuum robot.