Designing of Novel Wire-Driven Continuum Robot Arm with Passive Sliding Disc Mechanism: Forward and Inverse Kinematics

Continuum manipulators represent the great potential to be used in rescue operations, minimally invasive surgery and inspection in a confined environment. Despite low payload capacity, low precision, and control problem, continuum manipulators also have a problem related with accumulated strain energy inside of the structure. In case of bending discrete manipulator faces with shear and torsional stress. Likewise, stress leads to the overloading of the structure and can lead to motion distortion. In this paper, we propose a new sliding disc mechanism to improve dexterity and control, without sacrificing accuracy. The novelty of this paper is a designing smart bending stress and torsional stress distribution mechanism along the manipulator structure by passive sliding disc. The model forward and inverse kinematics, and kinetic formulation validated through simulations.