Collision Free Path Planning for Multi-Section Continuum Manipulators Based on a Modal Method

Continuum manipulators have excellent flexibility and compliance, making them useful for operations in unstructured environments such as minimally invasive surgeries and on-orbit service. However, planning motions to avoid obstacles for these manipulators, especially those with redundant degrees of freedom, is challenging due to the complex kinematics. In this paper, a collision free path planning algorithm is proposed for multi-section continuum manipulators. The classical modal approach for hyper-redundant arms is modified to make it applicable for continuum manipulators' constant curvature kinematics model. The contribution of this work lies in a novel fitting method to achieve obstacle avoidance when tip moves along spatial paths. The algorithm is validated by simulations of a five-section arm moving in clustered environments.