Boundary Control by Boundary Observer for Hyper-redundant Robots

The control problem of a class of hyper-redundant arms with continuum elements, with boundary measuring and control is discussed. First, the dynamic model of the continuum arm is presented. The measuring systems are based on the film sensors that are placed at the terminal sub-regions of the arm. The observers are proposed in order to reconstruct the full state of the arm. A back-stepping method is used to design a boundary control algorithm. Numerical simulations of the arm motion toward an imposed position are presented. An experimental platform shows the effectiveness of the proposed methods.