Design and Characterization of a Unified Continuum Robot Actuation Platform

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Article Summary

Continuum robots enable dexterous access to confined spaces in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and industrial inspection. However, their actuation systems are often custom-designed for specific robot architectures and tasks, limiting reuse across publications, institutions, and applications. This paper presents a unified actuation platform that decouples actuation hardware and software from continuum robot design. The platform provides modular actuation across continuum robot classes, scales to a large number of degrees of freedom (DOFs), and integrates with conventional serial manipulators for hybrid architectures. We validate the platform on an open-sourced surgical robotic system and experimentally characterize the actuation modules, achieving sub-millimeter translational accuracy and less than $5^\circ$ rotational error over ranges of $30$~mm and $180^\circ$, respectively. We further demonstrate the platform in two surgical use cases: teleoperation of a continuum camera in a constrained environment and bimanual manipulation using $2.53$~mm concentric-tube-robot-based forceps alongside a conventional wristed instrument. All hardware designs and ROS-based software are open-sourced to facilitate reuse and further research in continuum and surgical robotics.

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