Shape control of hyper redundant manipulator

This paper shows a control law to let hyper redundant manipulators be in specified shapes. Such shape controls are necessary for whole arm manipulation, crevice penetrations and obstacle avoidance. The proposed control is complete local-wise law. Each controller can determine its joint motion by itself while every controller has the same hardware and common control rule with the same parameters. Thus, the set of these distributed local controllers are just as a swarm intelligence. This type of manipulators are easily implemented, easily expandable and robust against partial damages