Kinematics modeling and simulation analysis of variable curvature kinematics continuum robots

Continuum robots increasingly attract researchers’ interest as long as an accurate solution for their modeling is still outstanding, in particular that having a variable curvature. The key issues in continuum robots are its kinematics models due to: structure complexity, equations nonlinearity, redundancy resolution, and so on. To tackle those issues, the first contribution presented in this paper provides with a methodology to simplify the calculation’s complexity of the Forward Kinematics Models (FKMs) of variable curvature continuum robots. The second one presents a numerical solution to their Inverse Kinematics Models (IKMs) by using a powerful optimization method, namely Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), taking into account specific constraints in both the configuration space and in the Cartesian space. Simulation examples through Matlab software have been carried out to verify and analyze the significance of the proposed contributions approaches. It is noteworthy that the proposed approaches can be successfully applied to constant curvature kinematics continuum robots.