Unified actuation platform enables versatile continuum robot control
Design and Characterization of a Unified Continuum Robot Actuation Platform
Robotics
Summary
Continuum robots are special flexible robots used in tight spaces like in surgery or inspections. The authors created a single actuation system that can work with many types of these robots instead of building new ones for each. They tested it with a surgical robot and found it can move very precisely. This system also works with regular robot arms and is open for others to use and improve.
What this means in practice
- •For surgical robot developers: Build versatile medical continuum robots with a modular actuation system tested for sub-millimeter precision and open-source controls.
- •For industrial robot engineers: Integrate continuum robots with conventional serial robot arms for inspection tasks in confined spaces using a shared actuation platform.
Authors
Yunti Xu, Aedan Mangan, Miheer Potdar, Alex Lu, Tania K. Morimoto
Abstract
Continuum robots enable dexterous access to confined spaces in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and industrial inspection. However, their actuation systems are often custom-designed for specific robot architectures and tasks, limiting reuse across publications, institutions, and applications. This paper presents a unified actuation platform that decouples actuation hardware and software from continuum robot design. The platform provides modular actuation across continuum robot classes, scales to a large number of degrees of freedom (DOFs), and integrates with conventional serial manipulators for hybrid architectures. We validate the platform on an open-sourced surgical robotic system and experimentally characterize the actuation modules, achieving sub-millimeter translational accuracy and less than $5^\circ$ rotational error over ranges of $30$~mm and $180^\circ$, respectively. We further demonstrate the platform in two surgical use cases: teleoperation of a continuum camera in a constrained environment and bimanual manipulation using $2.53$~mm concentric-tube-robot-based forceps alongside a conventional wristed instrument. All hardware designs and ROS-based software are open-sourced to facilitate reuse and further research in continuum and surgical robotics.