Path Planning for Continuum Arms in Dynamic Environments

Multisection continuum arms are bio-inspired manipulators that combine compliance, payload, dexterity, and safety to serve as co-robots in human-robot collaborative domains. Their hyper redundancy and complex kinematics, however, pose many challenges when performing path planning, especially in dynamic environments. In this paper, we present a W-Space based Rapidly Exploring Random Trees * path planner for multisection continuum arm robots in dynamic environments. The proposed planner improves the existing state-of-art planners in terms of computation time and the success rate, while removing the need for offline computation. On average, the computation time of our approach is below 2 seconds, and its average success rate is around 70 %. The computation time of the proposed planner significantly improves that of the state-of-the-art planner by roughly a factor of 20, making the former suitable for real-time applications. Moreover, for application domains where the obstacle motion is not very predictable (e.g., human obstacles), the proposed planner significantly improves the success rate of state-of-the-art planners by nearly 50 %. Lastly, we demonstrate the feasibility of several generated trajectories by replicating the motion on a physical prototype arm.