Real-Time Whole-Body Safe Motion Generation for Multi-Segment Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots

What happened

arXiv:2610.00220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time motion generation for tendon-driven continuum robots requires accurate modeling of nonuniform bending and whole-body collision avoidance. An energy-based variable-curvature model captures spatially varying tendon spacing and bending stiffness and provides analytical Jacobians for differential inverse kinematics and safety monitoring.

Hole-traversal tests further demonstrate safe motion in constrained environments. This paper presents a unified actuation-space framework for planar multi-segment tendon-driven continuum robots.

A multipoint CBF-QP enforces backbone clearance under obstacle motion and actuation-velocity bounds, while its decision dimension depends only on the number of independently actuated segments. The model closely agrees with GVS references, with a maximum curvature error of $5.223 \times 10^{-2}\,\mathrm{m}^{-1}$.