Continuum Flexible Robot with Multiple Curvature

Abstract

The continuum flexible robots are used at various fields due to characteristics of relatively more flexible than conventional rigid link-joint robots. Among many applications, this paper researches of the continuum flexible robot which can be apply with ballooning orbital floor blowout surgery. When the balloon support the fracture under the fractured orbital floor, the completeness of the surgery grows though this procedure can be performed by highly trained few surgeons. The core problem is the tip of the robot should bend most to get into the side pathway in narrow space by 1-DOF. The conventional flexible robots suppose it has equal curvature in entire flexible part or are got restrict of their structures for constant curvatures. For supplementing those problems, this paper designed the continuum flexible robot which has larger curvatures at the tip without increasing the number of actuators and analyzed the curvature ratio, the curvature according to the length of pulled wires and kinematics. The continuum flexible robot was tested by pulled wire from 0mm to 15mm and then was compared with measured value and estimated value. ⓒ 2016 DGIST