Stanley's Method-based shared control for path-following motion of continuum robots

Continuum robots have been widely used in confined environments. However, due to the narrow environment and limited visual field during the approaching process of the continuum robot, it is difficult to manually complete the approaching operation of complex channels. Therefore, a path following optimization algorithm based on Stanley method is proposed to enable the continuum robot to follow the given path autonomously and simplify the approaching operation featuring high computational efficiency. On this basis, for the safety and controllability of the approaching process, the human-machine shared control strategy is proposed through master traction and weighted sum of control vectors, so that the operator can guide or intervene the autonomous approaching motion of the robot in real time. The simulation results showed that the maximum terminal error of the autonomous path following motion of the two-segment continuum manipulator was 0.02mm, the maximum lateral error was 0.91mm and the average time consumption is only 0.66s. Experiments on the actual robot platform show that the continuum manipulator can smoothly enter the C-type pipeline model mimicking the middle nasal meatus, and the master-slave control is effective and sensitive after the operator intervenes in the approaching process. The feasibility of path following algorithm and human-machine shared control strategy are verified respectively.