A minimalistic hyper-flexible manipulator: Modeling and control

Robotic manipulators can be found today in most industries, from autonomous warehouses to advanced assembly lines in factories. Most of these industrial robots are characterized by having non-flexible and highly rigid links. In dense and complex environments these manipulators require many degrees of freedom (DOFs) which complicates the mechanical structure of the manipulator, as well as the control and path planning algorithms. In this work we present a minimalistic approach to reduce the number of active DOFs by using non-rigid, Hyper-Flexible Manipulators (HFM). We introduce a dynamic model of the HFM as well as a control scheme to bring the end-effector to a desired position from known initial configuration. Finally, we present experiments that support the analytic part and simulative results of this paper.