Model Predictive Control of 2-DOF Tendon-Driven Continuum Robot Using Optical Tracking

In recent years, there has been a growing research focus on continuum robots due to their high flexibility and safety. Nevertheless, the inherent nonlinearity of the flexible structure of continuum robots has increased the complexity of their motion control. In this work, we propose a method based on model predictive control (MPC) to achieve the closed-loop motion control of a tendon-driven continuum robot. The robot has two bending degrees of freedom (DOFs) and the constant curvature model is used as the kinematic model. Selective laser sintering (SLS) technology is utilized to fabricate the entire continuum robot system, while a tracking camera is used to measure the robot position to provide the real-time feedback for the MPC controller. Experiments are also conducted, in which the continuum robot is actuated to move along different predefined plane trajectories. As a result, the position error of the MPC-based controller is much smaller than that of an open-loop controller, which demonstrates the good control performance of the proposed method.