Dynamic Control of the Bionic Handling Assistant

In the previous decade, multiple approaches for kinematic controllers of continuum manipulators were successfully developed. However, for fast and exact motions of continuum robots that are hardly seen so far, dynamic controllers are necessary—especially for spatial manipulators with multiple sections. Therefore, a dynamic controller in actuator space is developed that both exploits input constraints and decouples the actuators in order to provide a good and intuitive dynamic behavior of the manipulator. Having a pneumatically actuated manipulator with multiple actuators, this can be achieved using a cascaded control approach with a centralized actuator length controller and an underlying decoupled pneumatic controller. For both the outer multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) controller and the inner single-input single-output (SISO) controllers, model-based controllers are developed based on suitable models using feedback linearization and a combination of feedforward control and linear PD-controllers. The resulting actuator controller can be used for tracking optimized trajectories in actuator space and also for possible extensions towards direct tool center point feedback.