New system simplifies flexible robot control, boosts precision

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar have developed a novel control method for tendon-driven continuum robots (TDCRs), which are flexible, soft robots capable of bending and twisting like biological structures. These robots are valuable for operating in confined spaces such as inside the human body but are challenging to control due to their nearly infinite degrees of freedom and the complex interactions between multiple sections. Traditional control methods require heavy computation and struggle to operate in real time. The new approach introduces a framework called virtual actuation space (VAS), which simplifies robot motion control by representing movements with just two parameters—direction and magnitude—allowing independent control of each robot section and reducing interference between segments. To validate their method, the researchers constructed a two-section robotic arm controlled by six motors and tracked its movements using a motion capture system with LED markers. The system demonstrated high precision, achieving an error margin of less than one percent while performing tasks such as reaching target points and following complex paths like pentagons and spirals