Abstract:
With the rapid advancements both in technology and in the area of surgery, a natural
merger has taken place by taking the advantages of robotics for the treatment of
patients. Class of robots with no rigid links/joints and present continuous bending
in architecture, are called continuum robots. Continuum robots possess great potential
in many challenging applications, where traditional rigid link robots pose
certain limitations e.g. working in unstructured congested workspaces etc. For
the usage of continuum robots in safety critical applications, such as surgeries and
nuclear decontamination, it becomes extremely important to ensure the safe path
for robot’s movement. Existing algorithms for the path planning of continuum
robots pose certain limitations that need to be addressed, e.g. none of the algorithm
provides safety parameters, assurance and control for path planning. They
are computationally expensive, applicable to specific type of continuum robots,
and mostly do not incorporate design and kinematics constraints. In this thesis,
we propose the points based path planning (PoPP) algorithm for continuum robots
that computes the path by imposing safety constraints and cater the limitations of
existing approaches. In the algorithm, we exploits constant curvature bending
property of continuum robots for their path planning. Algorithm is computationally
efficient and provides a good tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency that
can be exploited for safety critical applications of continuum robots. Algorithm
also provides the information of path volume and flexibility in movement. Simulation
results show that algorithm possess promising potential of applications for
all types of continuum robots (following constant curvature bending property for
their manipulator) to achieve desired safety with efficiency. Toward the contribution
of this thesis, we also propose single sensor based path planning (SSPP)
algorithm, which can be used for the path planning of continuum robots in static
environments using the input from single sensor. SSPP algorithm inherit novelties
attached with PoPP algorithm.
