FABRIKc: an Efficient Iterative Inverse Kinematics Solver for Continuum Robots

Abstract

Continuum robots and manipulators attracted lots of attention in the past decade owing to their dexterity, intrinsic compliance and design compactness. A widely accepted approach in formulating the kinematics of a multi-segment continuum robot is to assume their shapes as serially connected arcs with constant curvature at different values for each segment. In spite of the simplification in kinematics, complete analytic solutions of the inverse kinematics (IK) problem of such a multi-segment continuum robot may not exist. Instead, a generalized inverse Jacobian method is often used for the IK problem. This Jacobian-based method is computationally demanding and sometimes fails to solve the IK problem. This paper proposes a heuristic approach to iteratively solve the IK problem of a continuum robot. The algorithm implementation, which is straightforward, is elaborated. Several simulation case studies show that the algorithm is highly effective in computing the IK solutions for continuum robots with different topologies, indicating the effectiveness of this algorithm.