A New Continuum Robot With Crossed Elastic Strips: Extensible Sections With Only One Actuator Per Section

We propose a new kind of continuum robot based on crossed elastic strips. The actuator-specified location of the crossover point controls the lengths of the sections, enabling a wider range of configurations than would be possible with traditional fixed-section-length robots. Push-pull actuation of the crossed strips controls the curvature of the sections. We provide a model that describes the resulting configurations in terms of tangent circular arcs of varying lengths. Experiments with a prototype yield tip positions that agree with model predictions with an average error of 4.6% of the robots length.