Towards safer obstacle avoidance for continuum-style manipulator in dynamic environments

Ahmad Ataka, Peng Qi, Ali Shiva, Ali Shafti, Helge A. Wurdemann, Prokar Dasgupta, Kaspar Althoefer

Abstract: The flexibility and dexterity of continuum manipulators in comparison with rigid-link counterparts have become main features behind their recent popularity. Despite of that, the problem of navigation and motion planning for continuum manipulators turns out to be demanding tasks due to the complexity of their flexible structure modelling which in turns complicates the pose estimation. In this paper, we present a real-time obstacle avoidance algorithm for tendon-driven continuum-style manipulator in dynamic environments. The algorithm is equipped with a non-linear observer based on an Extended Kalman Filter to estimate the pose of every point along the manipulator's body. The overall algorithm works well for a model of a single-segment continuum manipulator in a real-time simulation environment with moving obstacles in the workspace of manipulators.