Nonlinear Model based Dynamic Control of Pneumatic driven Quasi Continuum Manipulators

Soft robotics is an emerging and promising field in the robotics community. Continuum manipulators represent a special class of soft robots. Due to their inherent compliant structure, these robots are especially interesting for human machine collaboration tasks. Yet, the control of these robots is still in its infancy. The accuracy and speed of the existing controllers is insufficient for industrial applications. Furthermore, these controllers lack generalization and are often tailored for a special robot. In this paper, we address these issues. We consider multiple quasi continuum manipulators which have both continuous pneumatic actuators and pneumatic swivel drives. Our solution approach is a model based nonlinear controller. In this paper we present the successful implementations and generalization of the proposed method on three quasi continuum manipulators with different kinematics.