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.